CLARENCE -POEIi
Book_
•Gopyiight]^^_
COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.
WHERE HALF THE WORLD
IS WAKING UP
COUNT SHIGE-NOBU OKUMA OF JAPAN
[From a photograph and autograph given the author)
Count Okuma, one of the Genro or Elder Statesmen of Japan and
ex-Premier of the Empire, is an opponent of his country's high pro-
tective tariff and an earnest advocate of international arbitration
WHERE HALF THE WORLD
IS WAKING UP
THE OLD AND THE NEW IN JAPAN, CHINA, THE
PHILIPPINES, AND INDIA, REPORTED
WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO
AMERICAN CONDITIONS
BY
CLARENCE POE
Avthor of " A Southerner in Europe" " Cotton: Its Cultivation
and Manufacture" Editor " The Progressive Farmer"
Sec'y North Carolina Historical Association, etc., etc.
Garden City New Yosk
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
6^<'to
fS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCH3DING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, XNCLUDING THE SCANTJINAVIAN
COFYKIGBT, IQII, BY CLARENCE POE
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
©CI.A303506
TO
THE RIGHT HONORABLE
^ JAMES BRYCE
IN WHOM ACHIEVEMENT, CHARACTER AND PERSONAL CHARM
MEET IN RARE SYMMETRY; WHO HAS WON THE WISDOM
OF AGE WITHOUT LOSING THE DEW OF YOUTH;
AND WHOSE GENEROUS FRIENDSHIP HAD MADE
ME HIS DEBTOR BEFORE IT AIDED ME
ANEW IN PLANNING AND EXECUTING
MY ORIENTAL TOUR
PREFACE
THE human race, to which so many of my readers
belong," as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton begins one of
his books by saying, has half its members in Asia.
That Americans should know something about so
considerable a portion of our human race is manifestly worth
while. And really to know them at all we must know them
as they are to-day.
Vast changes are in progress, and even as I write this, the
revolution in China, foreshadowed in the chapters written by
me from that country, is remaking the political life of
earth's oldest empire. From Japan to India there is indus-
trial, educational, political ferment. The old order changes,
yielding place to the new.
"Where Half the World is Waking Up" is not inappro-
priate therefore as the title of the book now offered to the
public. The reader will kindly observe here that I have writ-
ten of where half the world is waking up and not merely
of the waking-up itself. My purpose has been to set forth the
old and the new in due proportion; to present the play of new
forces against and upon the ancient, the amazingly ancient,
forces that have dominated whole races for centuries. In most
places, in fact, the ancient force is still clearly the dominant
one. Observe, too, therefore, that I have written not of where
half the world has waked up, but only of where it is waking up.
The significant thing is that the waking is really taking
place at all, and of this there can be no doubt.
It was, in short, with the hope of securing for myself and
presenting to others a photograph of the Orient as it is to-day
that I made my long trip through Japan, Korea, Manchuria,
viii PREFACE
China, the Philippines, and India during the past year. It
was not a pleasure trip nor yet a hurried "seaport trip." I
travelled either entirely across or well into the interior of each
country visited, and all my time was given to study and re-
search to fit me for the preparation of these articles.
That despite of the care exercised the book contains some
errors, is doubtless true. The sources of information in the
Orient are not always easy to find, nor always in accord
after one finds them. Consider, for example, the population
of Manchuria: it seems a simple enough matter, yet it required
the help of consuls of two or three nations to enable me to sift
out the truth from the conflicting representations of several
writers and so-caUed authorities.
For my part I can only claim a laborious and painstaking
effort to get the facts. Letters of introduction to eminent
Englishmen kindly furnished me by Ambassador Bryce opened
the doors of British officialdom for me, and the friendship
of Mr. Roosevelt and letters from Mr. Bryan and our Depart-
ment of State proved helpful in other ways. I thus had the
good fortune not only to get the ready fraternal assistance of
my brother newspaper men (of all races) everywhere, and the
help of English, German, and American consuls, but I was
aided by some of the most eminent authorities in each country
visited — in China, by H. E. Tang Shao-yi, Wu Ting Fang,
Sir Robert Bredon, Dr. C. D. Tenney, Dr. Timothy Richard;
in Japan, by ex-Premier Okuma, Viscount Kaneko, Baron
Shibusawa, Dr. Juichi Soyeda; in Hong Kong, by Governor-
General Sir Frederick Lugard; in Manila by Governor-General
Forbes, Vice-Go vernor Gilbert; in India, the members of the
Viceroy's Cabinet, Hon. Krishnaswami Iyer, Dr. J. P. Jones,
etc., etc. To all of these and to scores of others, my grateful
acknowledgments are tendered. They helped me get informa-
tion, but of course are in no case to be held responsible for
any opinions that I have expressed.
To Mr. G. D. Adams, of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Arthur
PREFACE ix
Mez, of Mannheim, Germany, two generous fellow-travellers,
my thanks are due for the use of many of their photographs,
and I am also indebted to The World's Work and The Review of
Reviews for permission to republish articles that have already
appeared in these magazines. The larger number of chapters
included in this volume, however, were originally prepared
with a view to their use in my own paper. The Progressive
Farmer. They are, therefore, often more elementary in char-
acter, let me say in the outset, than if they had been written
exclusively for bookbuyers, but it is my hope that their jour-
nalistic flavor, even if it has this disadvantage, will also be
found to have certain compensating qualities.
Perhaps just one other thing ought to be said: that practi-
cally every article about any country was written while I was
still in the country described. In this way I hoped not only
to write with greater freshness and vividness, but I was enabled
to have my articles revised and criticised by friends well
informed concerning the subjects discussed. The reader will
please bear in mind, therefore, that a letter about Tokyo is
also a letter from Tokyo, a letter about Korea is a letter from
Korea, etc., and shift his viewpoint accordingly. I have also
thought it best to be frank with the reader and let the chap-
ters on China remain exactly as they were written — present-
ing a pen picture of the Dragon Empire as it appeared on
the eve of the outbreak, while the revolution was indeed
definitely in prospect but not yet a reaUty.
"Give us as many anecdotes as you can," was old Samuel
Johnson's advice to Boswell, when that worthy proposed to
write of Corsica; and this wise suggestion I have sought to
keep in mind in all my travel. Moreover, another saying of
the great lexicographer's comes quaintly into my memory as
I conclude this Foreword: "There are two things which I am
confident I could do very well," he once remarked to Sir Joshua
Reynolds; "one is an introduction to any literary work stating
X PREFACE
what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most
perfect manner: the other is a conclusion, showing from various
causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author
promised to himself and to the publick!"
C. P.
Raleigh, N. C.
December 1, 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Japan: The Land op Upside Down . . . S
A Land of Contradictions — Music as an Example —
Marriage and the Home Life — Patriarchal Ideas Still
Dominant.
II. Snapshots of Japanese Life and Philosophy 9
What a Japanese City Is Like — Strange Clothing of the
Japanese — Who Ever Saw So Many Babies? — Alphonse
and Gaston Outdone — The Grace of the Little Women —
How the Old Japan and the Old South Were Alike — A
"Moral Distinction" Between Producers and Non-
Producers.
III. Japanese Farming and Farmer Folk . . 17
Japanese Farm Children Getting More Schooling than
American Farm Children — No Illiteracy in the New Japan
— Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm — How Iowa Might
Feed the Whole United States — Farming Without Horses
or Oxen — What the Japanese Farmers Raise — The Crime
of Soil-waste — All Work Done by Hand — Cooperative
Credit Societies a Success — Farm Houses Grouped in Vil-
lages — "A Seller of the Ancestral Land" — The Japanese
Love of the Beautiful a Suggestion for America.
rV. "Welfare Work" in Japanese Factories . 29
Manufacturing Bound to Increase — Tariff Legislation
Unfair to Agriculture — A Visit to a Progressive Japanese
Factory — How the Factory Operatives Are Looked After
— Stricter Factory Legislation Coming.
V. Does Japanese Competition Menace the
White Man's Trade 34
A Study of Japanese Industrial Conditions — Japanese
Labor Cheap but Inefficient — Actual Cost of Output
Little Cheaper than in America — Laborers in a State of
i CONTENTS
^APTEB FAGS
Deplorable Inexperience — Illustrations of Japanese IneiE-
ciency — Some Current Misconceptions Corrected — Labor
Wage Has Increased 40 Per Cent, in Eight Years — The
Burden of Taxation — High Tariff Will Decrease Japan's
Export Trade — Subsidy Policy Destroying Individual
Initiative — Japanese Competition Not a Serious Menace
to the White Man,
VI. Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity m
Japan 48
The Artistic Touch of the Japanese — Religion With-
out Morals — Buddhism in Fact vs. Buddhism Idealized
by Arnold — Official Notices Prohibiting Christianity —
Christianity "Puts Too High an Estimate on Woman"
— The Worth of the Individual Not Recognized — The
Elemental Significance of Japan's Awakening — A New
Type of Civilization.
VII. Korea: "The Land op the Morning Calm" 60
I Have Become a Contemporary of David — The Fascina-
tion of a Primitive City — Some Odd Korean Customs —
A True Romance and an Odd One — Many Faces Marked
by Smallpox — A Typical Monarchy of Ancient Asia —
The Honorable Mr. Yang-ban — Six Men to Carry Fifty
Dollars' Worth of Money — Japanese Annexation — Splen-
did Work of Foreign Missionaries.
VIII. Manchuria: Fair and Fertile .... 70
Some First-hand Stories of the Russo-Japanese War —
A Bit of History with a Lesson — The Site of the World's
Next Great War — Manchuria: Fair and Fertile — Fat
Harvests of Food, Feed, and Fuel — A Land Where Every-
body "Knows Beans" — Golden Opportunities for Stock-
raising — Better Plows and Level Culture — Graves as
Thick as Corn Shocks
IX. Where Japan Is Absorbing an Empire . . 78
Manchuria the One Great Oriental Empire Not Yet
Developed — Its Strategic Importance — Why the "Open
Door" Concerns Us All — Japan's Shrewd Policies — Con-
CONTENTS xiii
JAPTBB PAGE
tempt of Chinese Authority — Japan at Home vs. Japan in
Manchuria — How the Open Door Policy Was Violated —
Will Manchuria Go the Way of Korea? — A Bit of Chinese
Wit and Wisdom — Truth Is in the Interest of Peace.
X. Light FROM China ON Problems AT Home . . 93
A Chinese Martyr-Hero — The Most Tremendous Moral
Achievement of Recent Times — A Lesson for America —
Putting Officials on Salaries — Money Changers and Title
Changers — Making Education Practical — The Parcels
Post and Tarifif Reform.
XI. The New China: Awake and at Work. . 10^
The Coming National Parliament — The Successful War
Against Opium — China's Right-about-face in Education
— Building Up an Army — Attacking the Graft System
— Railroads, Posts, and Telegraphs — • America's Rela-
tions with China.
XII. A Trip into Rural China 116
The Camels from Mongolia — Strange Traffic and Travel
in Nankou Pass — The Great Wall of China — Surpris-
ingly Progressive Farming Methods.
XIII. From Peking to the Yangtze-Kiang . . . 123
Street Life in Peking — History That Is History —
Martyrdoms That Have Enriched the World — Average
Wages 15 to 18 Cents a Day — Homes Without Firesides —
All China a Vast Cemetery — Keeping on Good Terms with
Dragons — The Blessings of Our Alphabet — Confucius
as a Moral Teacher — My Friendship with a Descendant
of Confucius.
XIV. Sidelights on Chinese Character and In-
dustry ........... 132
Healthy Public Sentiment — Slavery and Foot-binding
Still Practised — "Big Feet No B'long Pretty"— -The
Popularity of a No. 2 Wife — The Virtue That Is Next to
Godliness Largely Disregarded — Some Discredited Ameri-
cans Discovered Abroad — A 600-Mile Trip on the Yangtze
XIV
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
River — An Interview with Wu Ting Fang — Fanning
on the Yangtze — Shanghai Factory Laborers Paid 12 Cents
a Day.
XV. Farewell to China 142
A City of 2,000,000 People Without a Vehicle — A Dead
Chinaman More Important and Respected Than a Live
One — Queer Features of Chinese Funerals — Cruelty of
Chinese Punishments — A Sample of Chinese Humor:
The Story of the Magic Jar — Amusing Trials of a Land
Buyer — "Pidgin English" — Everything Is Saved — The
Influence That Is Remaking China.
XVI. What I Saw in the Philippines .... 153
In Manila — A Trip Through Five Provinces — What
the PhiUppine Coimtry Looks Like — Every Filipino Has
Cigarette and a Clean Suit — A Mania for Cock-fighting —
Snapshots of Philippine Life — Labor the One Thing
Lacking.
XVII. What the United States Is Doing in the
Philippines 163
Thirty Thousand White People and 7,000,000 Filipinos
— Rich Resources and Varied Products — Millions in
Lumber — How the Islands Are Governed — Restricting
the Suffrage — Education: Achievements of the American
[ Government — Postal Savings Banks and the Torrens Sys-
tem — Public Health Work — Building Roads — And
Then Keeping Them Up — "A George Junior Repubhc."
XVIII. Asia's Greatest Lesson for America . . 173
Where 10 Cents a Day Is a Laborer's Wage — The Sav-
age Struggle for Existence in the East — Tasks Heart-sick-
ening in Their Heaviness — Where Women Are Burden-
bearers — $12 a Year for a Farm Hand — An Overcrowded
Population Not the Chief Cause of Asia's Poverty — A
Defective Organization of Industry Responsible — Foolish
Opposition to Labor-saving Tools — Our Debt to Machin-
ery — Knowledge Itself a Productive Agency — Ineffective-
ness of Oriental Labor — Tools and Knowledge the Secret
of Wealth — Importance of Our Racial Heritage — The
Final Lesson.
CONTENTS XV
CHAFTEB PAGE
XIX. The Straits Settlements and Burma . . 186
The Amazing Industry of the Chinese — Easy Money
in Cocoanuts — How Germany Is Capturing Oriental
Trade — Rangoon the City of Gorgeous Colors — Burma's
Buddhist Temples — Rangoon's Beasts of Barden — Where
the Elephants Do the Work — Some First-hand Jungle
Stories — My Lord the Elephant — Good-by to Burma.
XX. Hinduism — and the Himalayas .... 198
Theoretical vs. Practical Hinduism — The Kalighat
Temple, Calcutta — Human Sacrifices — Two Indian Places
of Worship : A Contrast — A Visit to Benares — Burning
the Bodies of the Dead — "Religion" as It Is in Benares
— The Himalayas: A New and Happier Subject.
XXI. "The Poor Benighted Hindus" . . . .210
India's Enormous Population — "The Wealth of the
Indies " a Romance — A Typical Indian Village — No
Chairs, Mattresses, Knives, or Forks Used — Where It Is
105 at Midnight — "Gunga Din" in Evidence — The
Lady of Banbury Cross Outdone.
XXII. Hindu Farming and Farm Life .... 218
Primitive Tools Used by Farmers — WTiat Crops Are
Grown — Where Drought Means Death — Reducing the
Ravages of Famine — Usury and a Remedy — Where
America Is Behind — Landowner and Farm Laborer —
Salaam, O Little Folk!
XXIII. The Caste System in India 226
No Man May Rise Higher, but May Fall Lower — How
Fatalism Sustains Caste — Contamination by Touch — A
Bone Collector's Pride of Rank — The "Thief Caste" —
Caste and the Banyan Tree — A Maharaja's Defence of
Caste — Some Forces That Are Battering Down the Sys-
tem — Foreign Travel Weakening Caste.
XXIV. The Plight of the Hindu Woman . . . 236
"Woman Is Not to Be Trusted" — Twelve-year-old
Brides and Bridegrooms — A Wedding Procession in Agra
cvi CONTENTS
:haptee faqb
— 6000 Rupees for a Wedding Feast — The Plight of the
Child-wives — Cruel Treatment of Widows — The Pic-
ture Not Wholly Dark — One Worthy Tribute to the Grace
of Woman.
XXV. More Leaves from an India Notebook . . 246
Some Historic Indian Cities — India No More Homogene-
ous than Europe — English Rule : An Interview with Mr.
Krishnaswami Iyer — Indian Wealth in a Few Hands —
16 Cents a Day an Incredibly High Wage — No Horses
on Indian Farms — Bombay a Great Cotton Market — The
Story of a Man-eater — A Snake Story to End With.
XXVI. What the Orient May Teach Us . . . 261
Conservation the Keynote — What Neglect of Her Forests
Has Cost China — Forestry Lessons from Japan and Korea
— Conserving Individual Wealth — The Essential Im-
morality of Waste — Avoiding the Wastes of War — Pre-
serving Our Physical Stamina and Racial Strength — A
Lesson from China — Patriotism as a Moral Force — The
Coming "Conflict of Color" — Oriental vs. Occidental
Ideals.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Count Shige-Nobu Okuma of Japan - - - - Frontispiees
PAGE ,^.
The Giant Avenue of Cryptomerias at Nikko - - - 13 ^^
Typical Japanese Costumes and Temple Architecture - 14
Japanese Farming Scenes --- 19
Japanese School Children ---------- 20
The Great Buddha (Diabutsu) at Kamakura - - - - 53
The Degenerate Koreans at Rest and at Work - - - 54
Like Scenes from Our Western Prairies ----- 81
Manchurian Women (showing peculiar head-dress) - - 82'
Chinese Waste-paper Collector - 82
Pu Yi the Son of Heaven and Emperor of the Middle ^
Kingdom -- 105 '
How China Is Dealing with Opium Intemperance - - 106
A Man-made Desert 117
Pumping Water for Irrigation ---------117
Transportation and Travel in China- ------ 118
Fashionable Chinese Dinner Party ------- 137
How Lumber Is Sawed in the Orient - 137
A Quotation from Confucius --------- 138
The Great Wall of China 147
Chinese Woman's Ruined Feet ._- 147 '^
Chinese School Children .-..-- 148
The American Consulate at Antung 148
A FiHpino's Home 157 '
The Carabao, the Work-stock of the Filipinos - - - 158 ''^
An Old Spanish Cathedral 158 "^
Society Belles of Mindanao, Philippine Islands - - - 181
A Street Scene in Manila ---------- 181
zvii
xviii ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Two Kinds of Workers in Burma ------- 182
Types at Darjeeling, Northern India, and at Delhi, Cen-
tral India - 205
Two Rangoon Types ------------ 206 "'
A Hindu Faquir --. 213 ,
Some Fashionable Hindus ---------- 213 ^
Hindu Children -------------- 214
The Taj Mahal from the Entrance Gate 241'^^
Gunga Din on Dress Parade --------- 242 '
Bathing in the Sacred Ganges at Benares ----- 249
The Battle-scarred and World-famous Residency at
Lucknow -------------- 250
Burning the Bodies of Dead Hindus ------ 255 -
An Indian Camel Cart ----------- 255*^
Travel in India - - - 256 '''
WHERE HALF THE WORLD
IS WAKING UP
JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN
I CANNOT help thinking," said one of my friends to me
when I left home, "that when you get over on the other
side of the world, in Japan and China, you will have to
walk upside down like the flies on the ceiling!"
While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is
true, as Mr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard
to the manners and customs of the people, everything is re-
versed, and the surest way to go right is to take pains to go
dead wrong! "To speak backward, write backward, read
backward, is but the A B C of Oriental contrariety."
Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have
come to Japan.
I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at
what with us would be the back of a book or paper and read
toward the front; and it is said that no European or Amer-
ican ever gets used to the construction of a Japanese sen-
tence, considered merely from the standpoint of thought-
arrangement. I had noticed that the Japanese usually ended
their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before I
learned that with them the subject of a sentence usually
comes last (if at all), as for example, "By a rough road
yesterday came John," instead of, "John came by a rough
road yesterday."
And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that
might be given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down,"
the land of contradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That
4 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Japan is a land "where the flowers have no odor and the birds
no song" has passed into a proverb that is almost literally
true; and similarly, the far-famed cherry blossoms bear no
fruit. The typesetters I saw in the Kokumin Shimbum office
were singing like birds, but the field-hands I saw at Komaba
were as silent as church-worshippers. The women carry
children on their backs and not in their arms. The girls dance
with their hands, not with their feet, and alone, not with
partners. An ox is worth more than a horse. The people bathe
frequently, but in dirty water. The people are exceptionally
artistic, yet the stone "lions" at Nikko Temple look as much
like bulldogs as lions. A man's birthday is not celebrated,
but the anniversary of his death is. The people are immeasur-
ably polite, and yet often unendurably cocky and conceited.
Kissing or waltzing, even for man and wife, would be improper
in public, but the exposure of the human body excites no
surprise. The national government is supposed to be modern,
and yet only 2 per cent, of the people — the wealthiest — can
vote. Famed for kindness though the people are, war cor-
respondents declared the brutality of Japanese soldiers to the
Chinese at Port Arthur such as "would damn the fairest
nation on earth." Though the nation is equally noted for sim-
plicity of living, it is a Japanese banker, coming to New York,
who breaks even America's record for extravagance, by giving a
banquet costing $40 a plate. The people are supposed to be
singularly contented, and yet Socialism has had a rapid growth.
The Emperor is regarded as sacred and almost infallible,
and yet the Crown Prince is not a legitimate son. Although
the government is one of the most autocratic on earth, it has
nevertheless adopted many highly "paternalistic" schemes —
government ownership of railways and telegraphs, for example.
'The people work all the time, but they refuse to work as
strenuously as Americans. The temples attract thousands of
people, but usually only in a spirit of frolic : in the first Shinto
temple I visited the priests offered me sake (the national liquor)
JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN 5
to drink. Labor per day is amazingly cheap, but, in actual
results, little cheaper than American labor.
It is amid such a maze of contradictions and surprises that
one moves in Japan. When I go into a Japanese home, for
example, it is a hundred times more important to take off my
shoes than it is to take off my hat — even though, as happened
this week when I called on a celebrated Japanese singer, there
be holes in my left sock. (But I was comforted later when
I learned that on President Taft's visit to a famous Tokyo
teahouse his footwear was found to be in like plight.)
Speaking of music, we run squarely against another oddity,
in that native Japanese (as well as Chinese) music usually
consists merely of monotonous twanging on one or two strings
— so that I can now understand the old story of Li Hung Chang's
musical experiences in America. His friends took him to hear
grand opera singers, to listen to famous violinists, but these
moved him not; the most gifted pianists failed equally to in-
terest him. But one night the great Chinaman went early to
a theatre, and all at once his face beamed with delight, and he
turned to his friends in enthusiastic gratitude: "We have found
it at last!" he exclaimed. "That is genuine music!" . . .
And it was only the orchestra "tuning up" their instruments!
I might as well say just here that this story, while good,
always struck me as a humorous exaggeration till I came to
Japan, but the music which I heard the other night in one of
the most fashionable and expensive Japanese restaurants in
Tokyo was of exactly the same character — like nothing else in
all the world so much as an orchestra tuning up! And yet by
way of modification (as usual) it must be said that appreciation
of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in classical
selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than Mrs.
Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also
surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time
American favorites like a genuine Southerner.
Take the social relations of the Japanese people as another
6 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
example of contrariety. Here the honorable sex is not the
feminine but the masculine. There is even a proverb, I be-
lieve, "Honor men, despise women." Perhaps the translation
"despise" is too strong, but certainly it would be regarded as
nothing but contemptible weakness for young men to show
any such regard for young women, or husbands for their wives,
as is common in America. The wives exist solely for their
husbands, nor must the wife object if the husband maintains
other favorites, or even brings these favorites into the home
with her. And although a man is with his wife a much greater
part of his time than is the case in America, he may have little
or no voice in selecting her; in fact, he may see her only once
before marrying.
After having seen probably half a million or more Japanese,
Sundays and week-days, I have not noticed a single young
Japanese couple walking together, and in the one case where
I saw a husband and a wife walking thus side by side I dis-
covered on investigation that the man was blind !
"For a young couple to select each other as in America,"
said a young Japanese gentleman to me, "would be considered
immoral, and as for a young man calling on a young woman,
that never happens except clandestinely." And when I asked if
it was true that when husband and wife go together the woman
must follow the man instead of walking beside him as his
equal, he answered: "But it is very, very seldom that the two
go out together."
My Japanese friend also told me that the young man often
has considerable influence in selecting his life-partner (in case
it is for life: there is one divorce to every three to five marriages),
but the young woman has no more voice in the matter than the
commodity in any other bargain-and-sale. When a young
man or young woman gets of marriageable age, which is
rather early, the parents decide on some satisfactory prospec-
tive partner, and a "middleman" interviews the parents of
the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing, and
JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN 7
financial and other considerations are satisfactory, it doesn't
matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whether
young Barkis himself is "willin'." The Sir Anthony Abso-
lutes in Japan indeed brook no opposition. All of which, while
not wholly commendable (my young Japanese friend himself
dislikes the plan, at least in his own prospective case), has at
least the advantage of leaving but remarkably few bachelors
and old maids in Japan. Here every man's house may not
be his castle, but it is certainly his nursery. Usually, too, in
the towns at least, his home is his shop; the front part full of
wares, with no hard and fast dividing line between merchandise
rooms and the living rooms, children being equally conspicuous
and numerous in both compartments.
Japan is still governed largely on patriarchal lines. The
Emperors themselves depend largely on the patriarchal spirit
for their power, claiming direct descent in unbroken line from
the Sun-Goddess, while the people are supposed to be them-
selves descendants of Emperors or of minor gods. In family
life the patriarchal idea is still more prominent, the father
being the virtual ruler until he abdicates in favor of the eldest
son.
Ancestor-worship is general, of course, and a typical case
is that of my young Nikko friend, who tells me that in his
home are memorial tablets to six of his most recently deceased
ancestors, and that hot rice is placed before these tablets each
morning. Now the teaching is that the spirits of the dead
need the odor of the rice for nourishment, and also require
worship of other kinds. Consequently the worst misfortune
that can befall a man is to die without heirs to honor his memory
(the mere dying itself is not so bad); and if an oldest son die
unmarried such action amounts almost to treason to the family.
Moreover, if a man be without sons (daughters don't count),
he may adopt a son; and the cases of adoption are surprisingly
frequent. Count Okuma, ex-prime minister of the empire,
whom I visited last Sunday, adopted his son-in-law as his
8 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING IIP
legal son. A distinguished banker I visited is also an adopted
son; and in a comparatively brief list of eminent Japanese, a
sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who," I find perhaps
twenty cases in which these eminent officials and leaders have
been adopted and bear other family names than those with
which they were bom.
The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed
in the light of the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors
and family name, is only another illustration of Japanese
contrariety. It is a land of surprises.
Miyanoshita, Japan.
n
SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY
'HAT is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "sup-
pose," as the children say. You know the Amer-
ican city nearest you, or the one you live in.
Suppose then you should wake up in this city
to-morrow morning and find in the first place that forty-nine
people out of every fifty have put on such unheard-of clothing
as to make you rub your eyes in wonder as to whether you
are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has become six
inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot
men and four-foot women have unanimously developed most
violent sunburn — have become bronzed almost beyond
recognition.
Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all dis-
appeared, and a wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story
houses has taken their places, wherein the first story, even
in two-story buildings, is so low that all your new brown
friends warn you by a gesture to duck your head as you go
through the doors, while the second story is usually little more
than a garret.
Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear
and you discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred
have forgotten how to speak English. More than this, the
English signs are no more, and on the billboards and before
the business offices are marks that look as if a thousand ostriches
fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been set to scratching
new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up a book
d
10 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened — pig
tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically
tied instead of English type — and everybody begins at the
back of the book and reads toward him instead of reading the
way you have grown used to!
And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth
has become of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but
dozens or scores of men with bare legs and odd clothes, each
flying around pulling a light two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a
woman seated in each man-drawn "buggy"; and there are
dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously pulling heavy
loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant tele-
graph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and for-
get your strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your
surroundings till a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Ba-
laam when the ass spoke to him!
By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people
are dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something
like this :
Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a
modern American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and
several thousand seashore bathers have all thrown their
clothes — (or the lack of them !) — into one tremendous pile,
and everybody has rushed in pell-mell and put on the first
thing, or the first two or three things, that came to hand.
There is every conceivable type of clothing, but perhaps the
larger number have wound up with something like a light
bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted over
it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese
say, "Shikata na gai" (All right; it can't be helped). In the
shops and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own
integrity and a loin-cloth, and both children and grown people
dress with a hundred times more disregard of convention than
the negroes in America.
Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing,
SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 11
but the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy
weather at least) have compromised on the "getas," a sort of
wooden sole strapped on the foot, with wooden pieces put
fore and aft the instep, these pieces throwing the foot and sole
about three inches above ground. It looks almost as difficult
to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the people go,
young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange
footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mow-
ing-machines had passed along! In most cases the clatter
of the "get as" is the loudest noise on the streets, for the Japa-
nese are remarkably quiet: in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand
of them waiting to see the Empiess, and an American crowd
would literally have made more noise in a minute than they
made in an hour.
On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the
people take oflf their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer
footwear is used — for the very good reason that the people
sit on the floor (on mats or on the floor itself), eat on the
floor (very daintily, however), and sleep on the floor, so that to
walk over the floor here with muddy feet would be the same as
if an American should walk roughshod over his chairs, table
and bed. Even in the Japanese department store I visited
this morning cloth covers were put on my shoes, and this
afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to go
in my stocking feet.
Then the babies — who ever saw as many babies to the
square inch? About 10 per cent; of the male population seems
to be hauling other men, but 50 per cent, of the female popula-
tion seems hardly enough to carry the wise and happy-looking
little Jap babies — not in go-carts (a go-cart or a hired nurse
is almost never seen), but on the back. And these little women
who when standing are only about as tall as you are when
sitting — they seem hardly more than children themselves,
so that you recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot
child walks with a three-foot child, who is holding the hand
12 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
of a two-foot child, who carries on her back a one-foot
child."
Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their
backs in the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and
after work- time the father takes a turn at the same business.
You are reminded of the negro who said to another: " 'Fo Gawd,
Bill, you's got the mos' chillun any nigger I ever seed. Why,
I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' at nine erclock and throwed
a brick on top and hollered Tiah!' an' at five erclock in the
evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" It seems some-
times as if such an incident, with Jap children substituted
for negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually
happen in Japan.
And those two men bowing to each other as they meet —
are they rehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy
show to-night, or are they serious? No, they are serious, for
yonder is another pair meeting in the same way, and yonder
another couple separating with even more violent "convulsions
of politeness ' ' — and nobody laughing but yourself. No wonder
the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a few friends
a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim ! Look again :
those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there are
familiar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger
cars amid all these strange surroundings). There is the
woman with her hair combed straight back, which, I am told,
means that she is a widow; one with an odd Japanese topknot,
which means that she is married, and a younger one whose hair
is arranged in the style of unmarried girls; and though they are
evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace and kiss at
meeting — to kiss in public would be shocking to the Japanese
— and you can only guess the depth of their affection by the
greater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another.
They are trained in politeness from their youth up, are these
Japanese; and it is perhaps the greatest charm of both young
and old, I must have seen a full hundred thousand Japanese
THE GIANT AVENUE OF < UYPTOMEHIA.S AT NIKKO
This magnificent avenue, twenty-five miles in length, consists of trees planted
by daimyos, or small lords, as a memorial to the great Japanese warrior and
statesman, lyeyasu. A spirit of simplicity and love of nature has produced
a nobler monument than extravagance could possibly have done
TYPICAL JAPANESE COSTUMES AND TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE
In the temple picture notice also how the limbs of the trees have been trained
Many fantastic effects are often produced in this way
SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 15
by this time, and I do not recall one in the attitude of scolding
or abuse, while authorities tell me that the Japanese language
simply has no words to enable one to swear or curse. I was
also interested to have the American Ambassador here tell me
that in all his three years' stay in Japan, and with all the
freedom with which a million children run about the streets
and stores, he has never seen a man impatient with a child.
At the Imperial University yesterday morning I noticed two
college boys part with the same deep courtesy used by the
older men, and the little five-year-old girl near Chuzenji the
other day thanked me for my gift with the most graceful of
Eastern salaams.
I shall not say that the excessive ceremoniousness of the men
does not at times seem ludicrous, but when you come to your
hotel dining-room, and the inexpressibly dainty little Japanese
girls, moving almost noiselessly on their sandaled feet (no getas
indoors) welcome each guest with smiling bows, happy, refined
and graceful, a very different impression of Japanese courtesy
comes over you. In America, unfortunately, the like cour-
teous attention under such circumstances might be misinter-
preted, but here you are only reminded of how a thousand years
of courtesy and gentle manners have given the women of
Japan — pretty though they are not, judged by our Western
standards — an unsurpassed grace of manner and happiness
of disposition together with Shakespeare's well-praised "voice,
soft and low, an excellent thing in woman."
And here and everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with
the overcoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more power-
ful in compelling deference than all the stormy strength of
the "new woman".?
Which reminds me that however much the social, political,
and economic revolution of the last forty years may have
changed the national character (and upon this point I shall
not speak till later), it is certain that Old Japan and the Old
South were distinguished for not a few characteristics in
16 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
common. For example, we are reminded of the South's ante-
bellum civilization when we learn that in old Japan "the
business of money-making was held in contempt by the su-
perior classes," and of all forms of business, agriculture was
held in highest esteem. Next to the nobility stood the Samurai,
or soldier class, the social rank of all other persons then being
as follows: (1) farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And
farming was thus not only regarded as the most honorable
of all occupations, but farmers in the early ages were privi-
leged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next to the nobility.
Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while as
Lafcadio Hearn tells us:
"The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants, shopkeepers,
and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially recognized. The business
of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes; and all methods
of profiting by the purchase and resale of the produce of labor were regarded
as dishonorable. . , . There is a generally, in militant society, small
respect for the common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation
of the farmer and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been
considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a moral one."
I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we have
realized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and
essential "morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming
and manufacturing above trade as occupations? Morally and
economically considered, it is the men who actually produce
wealth rather than those men who trade or barter in the products
of other men's labor who deserve most honor. They serve the
world best : The barterers are, in limited numbers, necessary
and useful servants of those who do produce, but the strength
of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are really creators
of values.
ToIq'^o, Japan.
Ill
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK
I WENT yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Im-
perial University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near
Tokyo, where I had an appointment with Director
Matsui. My purpose was to get further information
concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and
Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought
out was not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or
any other field product of the Mikado's empire.
Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the
most important of all crops — the crop of boys and girls. And
the big fact I discovered was simply this:
These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we
opened to civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought
of but yesterday as backward "heathen" — they are getting,
as a general proposition, just twice as much schooling as is
furnished pupils in many of our American rural districts : their
parents are providing, in their zeal for their children's welfare,
just twice as good educational facilities as we are giving many
of our white farm boys and girls — boys and girls who have in
their veins the blood of a race which has carried the flag of
human progress for a thousand years, and whom we are ex-
pecting to continue leaders in civilization and enlightenment.
In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to-
day to the Japanese National Department of Education to
verify the fact), the Japanese farm boys and girls are getting
ten months' schooling a year, while the farm boy or girl in
17
18 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
my own state is getting only five or six months — and when I
was in a country school fifteen years ago, not nearly so much
as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the Japanese
educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and
girls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell
him how we compare in the matter of utilizing school advan-
tages, when he showed me that of all the children between
six and fourteen in all the empire of Japan the school
attendance is 98 per cent. — 98 out of every 100 children of
"school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99
out of every 100! Thirty -five years ago the average school
attendance in Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by
the time of the war with Russia it had passed 90, and since then
has been climbing straight and steadily toward the amazing
maximum itself, the official figures showing a gain of 1 per
cent, a year — 94 per cent., then 95, then 96, then 97, and now
98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99 or 100, as they
told me to-day.
When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, further-
more, that Japan is so intent upon educating every boy and
girl in her borders that she compels attendance on the public
schools for eight years, I didn't tell him that in civilized
America, in the great enlightened nation so long held up to
him as a model, demagogues and others in many states on
one pretext or another have defeated every effort for effective
compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents are in-
different to his future, the state does not compel them to give
him a fighting chance in life — for the state's own sake and
for the boy's.
With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make
any vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of
our own states these last twenty years : However much prog-
ress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have
beaten us. While there is no official census on the question
of illiteracy here, every Japanese man in his twenties must serve
JAPANESE FARMING SCENES
h..ilJfn7^^'"/'^^''^ '^°T', ^^^^f ^^^^ '"^ ^^^ foreground, tea alongside the
buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also an
unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows
tne work ot transplanting rice
JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN
Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system of
compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of the children of
school age" attend. Even the country schools run ten months in the year —
longer than in a majority of our states
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 21
two years in the army (unless he is in a normal school studying
to be a teacher), and a record is made as to the literacy or
illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a place
where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be
recorded, but the Department of Education informed me
to-day that the illiterate column is now absolutely blank.
There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation.
More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty
that the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in
our plenty. We waste more in a year than they make. Even
with a hundred acres of land the American farmer is likely to
consider himself poor, but when I asked my Japanese guide
the other day if two cho (five acres) would be an average
sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man
would be regarded as a middle-class farmer — a rather large
farmer.'' And the figures which I have just obtained in a
call on the national Department of Agriculture and Commerce
more than justify the reply.
Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than
one and one quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own
less than two and one half acres, and only one man in a hundred
owns as much as twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation
also I find that 70 per cent, cultivate less than two and one
half acres, and nearly half are tenants.)
This year the situation is even worse than usual, for dis-
astrous floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one
half Japan's crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures,
and many people will suffer.
Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief -sized farms
yield amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that
the fields of Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so
painstakingly, and kept so continuously producing some crop,
that they feed 2277 people to the square mile — 21,321 square
miles of cultivated fields in the main islands supporting a
population of 48,542,376. If the tilled fields of Iowa, for
22 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
example, supported an equal number of people per square mile,
the population so supported would be over 100,000,000. That
state alone could feed the entire population of the United
States and then have an excess product left for export to other
countries! If North Carolina did as well with her cultivated
land she would support 30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's
11,875 square miles of land under cultivation supported each
2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people, or thirteen times the
present population of the state, could live off their produce!
And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for
unnumbered centuries. Some of them may have been cleared
when King Herod trembled from his dream bi a new-born rival
in Judea, and certainly "the glory that was Greece and the
grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the earth when
some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human
need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer
putting back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from
it, for commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until
our own generation.
Of course, with a population so dense and with each man
cultivating an area no larger than a garden-patch in America,
the people are poor, and the wonder is that they are able to
produce food enough to keep the country from actual want.
Practically no animal meat is eaten; if we except fish, the
average American eats nearly twice as much meat in a week
as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds
of meat per capita is required per year for the average American
against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the
farmers here are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice.
Consequently Japan presents the odd phenomenon of being
at once an exporter and a large importer of rice. Poor farmers
sell their good rice and buy a poorer quality brought in from
the mainland of Asia and mix it with barley for grinding.
Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most
cases all the work must be done by hand and with crude tools.
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 23
It is pitiful — or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they
did not appear so contented — to see men breaking the ground
not by plowing but by digging with kuwas : long-handled tools
with blades perhaps six inches wide and two feet long. At
the Agricultural College farm in Komaba I saw about thirty
Japanese weeding rice with the kama — a tool much like an
old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right
hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and the
left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like
kamas about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking
corn: they are at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was
interested to notice!
With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep some-
thing on the ground every growing day from year's end to
year's end. Truckers and gardeners raise three crops a year.
Rice, as a rule, is not sown as with us, but the plants are trans-
planted as we transplant cabbage or tomato plants (but so
close together, of course, that the ripening fields look as if
they had been sown), in order that the farmer may save the
time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage.
That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while
the rice plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding
through the country almost anywhere you will notice the tender
young plants of some new crop showing between the rows of
some earlier-planted crop now maturing or newly harvested.
The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents
half the agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm
industry, and then barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet
potatoes, and fruits. There is especial interest in fruit grow-
ing just now. Sweet potatoes grow more luxuriantly than in
any other country I have ever seen, and are much used for
food, I have seen one or two little patches of cotton, but
evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said
that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Jap-
anese territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much
24 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
cultivated plant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water-
lily, is the taro, which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots
are used for food as potatoes are.
Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is
religiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand
for commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per
acre being a normal application.
So much for the farming country as it has impressed me
around Tokyo. A few days ago I saw a somewhat different
agricultural area — 280 miles of great rice-farming land be-
tween Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country is different
from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it is
so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji,
supreme among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater
efforts are therefore necessary to take care of the soil.
But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be
made. The population is so dense that every one realizes
the essential criminality of soil- waste, of the destruction of the
one resource which must support human life as long as the
race shall last.
Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say,
tiers. That is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from
eighteen inches to six feet higher (all as level as a threshing-
floor) than a similar level piece adjoining. While the levelling
is helpful in any case for the preservation of fertility and the
prevention of washing, the tier system is necessary in many
cases on account of the irrigation methods used in rice growing.
While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland crops may be
growing on the adjacent elevated acre or haff-acre.
The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the
last available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the
men and women carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering
crop. In nearly all cases the rows are on a level. Where there
was once a slanting hillside the Japanese here dig it down or
grade it, and the mountainsides are often enormous steps or
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 25
stairs; one level terrace after another, each held in place by
turf or rock wall.
Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls
for much bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into
the muddy, miry, water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk
must wade, to plant the rice laboriously, plant by plant; then
the cultivation and harvesting is also done by hand, and even
the threshing, I understand. When we recall that the net re-
sult of all this bitter toil is only a bare existence made increas-
ingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and that the
Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which
give joy and color to American and English country life, it is
no wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and
three acre plots, too small to produce a decent living for a
family, to try their fortunes in the factories and the towns.
Specifically, it may be mentioned that the boys from the
farms who go into the army for the compulsory two years'
service are reported as seldom returning to the country.
True, the government is trying to help matters to some
extent (though this is indeed but little) by lending money to
banks at low rates of interest with the understanding that the
farmers may then borrow from these banks at rates but little
higher; and there are also in most communities, I learn, "co-
operative credit societies" (corresponding somewhat to the
mutual building and loan societies in American towns), by
means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shy-
lock money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as
20 to 30 per cent, for advances. The Japanese farmers invest
their surplus funds in these "cooperative credit societies,"
just as they would in savings banks, except that in their case
their savings are used solely for helping their immediate neigh-
bors and neighborhoods. A judicious committee passes
upon each small loan, and while the interest rates might seem
high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here
commands higher intei:est than in America.
26 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
I am the more interested in these "cooperative credit so-
cieties," because they seem to me to embrace features which
our American farmers would do well to adopt.
It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had
twenty years ago, but I should think that there has been little
improvement in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they
live. These houses are grouped into small villages, as are
the farm houses in Europe, the farmer going out from the set-
tlement to his fields each working day, much after the fashion
of the workers on the largest American plantations. Build-
ings corresponding to our American two-story houses are almost
never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming
sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually con-
sisting of a story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered
sash between the rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the
meals are cooked, and no chimney — little better, though
much cleaner, than the negro cabins in the South. In
winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the fact
that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile
on cotton padding until they look almost like walking
feather beds.
True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear
that my average reader would get a very gloomy and false
conception of Japanese farm life if I should stop here. The
truth is that, so far as my observation goes, I have seen noth-
ing to indicate that the rural population of Japan is not now
as happy as the rural population in America. If their posses-
sions are few, so are their wants. In fact. Dr. Juichi Soy-
eda, one of the country's leading men, in talking to me, ex-
pressed a doubt as to whether the new civilization of Japan
will really produce greater average happiness than the old rural
seclusion and isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not
share). "Our farm people," he said, "are hard-working,
frugal, honest, cheerful, and while their possessions are
small, there is little actual want among them. A greater
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 27
number than in most other countries are home-owners, and,
altogether, they form the backbone of an empire."
Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy illustration of
the affection of the people for their home farms. "The Jap-
anese," he said, "have a term of contempt for the man who
sells an old homestead." There is no English word equivalent
to it, but it means "a seller of the ancestral land," and to say
it of a man is almost equivalent to reflecting upon his character
or honor! I wish that we might develop in America such
a spirit of affection for our farm homes.
I wish, too, that we might develop the Japanese love of the
beautiful in nature. No matter how small and cramped the
yard about the tiny home here, you are almost sure to find
the beauty of shrub and tree and neatly trimmed hedge, and
in Tokyo the whole population looks forward with connoisseur-
like enthusiasm to the season for wistaria blooms in earliest
spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, to lotus-time in
mid-summer, and to the chrysanthemum shows in the fall. The
fame of Tokyo's cherry blossoms has already gone around the
world, and thus they not only add to the pleasure of its citi-
zens, but give the city a distinction of no small financial advan-
tage as well.
Why may not our civic improvement associations, women's
clubs, etc., get an idea here for our American towns? A long
avenue of beautiful trees along a road or street, even if trees
without blossoms, would give distinction to any small village
or to any farm. Every one who has been to Europe will
recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that make the fair
vision of many French roads linger long in the memory, and I
can never forget the magnificent avenue of cryptomerias —
gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the cedars of
Lebanon — that line the road leading to the great Shogun
lyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.
Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better
day is coming, Their children are going to school, as the
28 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
older folk could not, and as a Japanese editor said to me
this week:
"Every boy in the empire believes he may some day be-
come Premier!"
What is the lesson of it all? Is it not just this: That we
in America should feel highly favored in that we have such
magnificent resources, and yet as sharply rebuked in that we
are doing so little with them.
And most of all, is there not need for us to emulate the
broad patriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which
the Land of the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is provid-
ing ten-months schools for every boy and girl in all its borders?
And, indeed, how otherwise can we make sure, before it is too
late, that our American farm boys and girls will not be out-
distanced in twentieth-century achievement by the children
of a people our fathers regarded only as hopeless "heathen?"
Tokyo, Japan.
IV
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES
THE obvious truth is that the agricultural population
of Japan is too congested. It is a physical impos-
sibility for a people to live in genuine comfort
on such small pocket-handkerchief pieces of land,
even though their standards do not call for shoes or tables, beds
or chairs. Western houses or Western clothing. The almost
exclusive use of hand labor, too, is uneconomic, seen from a
large standpoint, and it would seem that in future farmers
must combine, as they are already beginning to do, in order to
purchase horses and horse-power tools to be used in common
by a number of farmers. In the Tokyo Seed, Plant & Imple-
ment Company store the other day I saw a number of widely
advertised American tools, and the manager told me the demand
for them is increasing.
Thus with a smaller number of men required to produce
the nation's food, a larger number may engage in manufactur-
ing, and gradually the same principle of division of labor which
has brought Western people to high standards of living, com-
fort, and earning power will produce much the same result in
Japan. Already wages, astonishingly low as they are to-day
to an ordinary American, have increased 40 per cent, in the
last eight or ten years, this increase being partly due to the
general cheapening of money the world over, and partly also
to the increased efficiency of the average laborer.
Unfortunately, however, Japan is not content to rely upon
natural law for the development of its manufactures. Adam
30 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Smith said in his "Wealth of Nations" (published the year of
our American Declaration of Independence), that the policy
of all European nations since the downfall of the Roman
Empire had been to help manufacturing, the industry of the
towns, rather than agriculture, the industry of the country —
a policy in which America later imitated Europe. Japan now
follows suit. For a long time the government has paid enor-
mous subsidies to shipbuilding and manufacturing corporations,
and now a high tariff has been enacted, which wiU still further
increase the cost of living for the agricultural classes, compris-
ing, as they do, two thirds of the country's population.
"With your cheap labor and all the colossal Oriental market
right at your door," I said to Editor Shihotsu of the Kohumin
Shimbun a day or two ago, "what excuse is there for further
dependence on the government? What can be the effect of
your new tariff except to increase the burdens of the farmer for
the benefit of the manufacturer.'*" And while defending the
policy, he admitted that I had stated the practical effect of
the policy. "They are domestic consumption duties," was
his phrase; and Count Okuma, one of the empire's ablest men,
once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointed out how injuri-
ously the new law will affect the masses of the people.
"Some would argue," he said in a speech at Osaka, "that
the duties are paid by the country from which the goods are
imported. That this is not the case is at once seen by the
fact that an increase in duty means a rise in the price of an
article in the country imposing the duty, and this to the actual
consumer often amounts to more than the rise in the duty.
In these cases consumers pay the duty themselves; and the
customs revenues, so far from being a national asset, are merely
another form of taxation paid by the people." And the masses
in Japan, already staggering under the enormous burden of an
average tax amounting to 32 per cent, of their earnings (on
account of their wars with China and Russia and their enormous
army and navy expenditure), are ill-prepared to stand further
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES 31
taxation for the benefit of special interests. On the whole,
there seems to have been much truth in what a recent authority
said on this subject:
" The Japanese manufacturers are concerned only to make monopoly profits
out of the consumer. If they can do that, they will not worry about foreign
markets, from which, in fact, their policy is bound more and more to exclude
them."
In any case, manufacturing in Japan is bound to increase,
but it ought not to increase through unjust oppression of
agriculture or at the expense of the physical stamina of the
race. This fact is now winning recognition not only from the
nation at large, but from public-spirited manufacturers as well.
Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me
Wednesday when influential friends secured special per-
mission, not often granted to strangers, for me to visit the
great Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning Company's plant near
Tokyo — the great surprise being not that I succeeded in
getting permission to visit this famous factory, though that was
partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit.
Much has been said and written as to the utterly deplorable
condition of Japanese factory workers, and I was quite prepared
for sights that would outrage my feelings of humanity. Imag-
ine my surprise, therefore, when I found the manager making
a hobby of "welfare work" for his operatives and with a sys-
tem of such work modelled after the Krupp system in Germany,
the best in the world! And as the Kanegafuchi Company
has seventeen factories in all, representing several cities and
aggregating over 300,000 spindles, being one of the most famous
industries of Japan, it will be seen that its example is by no
means without significance.
The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500
operatives, and they are cleaner, I should say, than most of
our stores and offices. The same thing is true of their great
hospital and boarding-house, and the dining-room is also sur-
32 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
prisingly clean and well kept. Of the welfare work proper a
whole article could be written. Each operative pays 3 per
cent, of his or her wages (most operatives are women) into a
common insurance and pension fund, and the company, out
of its earnings, pays into the fund an equal amount. From
this a pension is given the family of any employee who dies,
while if an operative gets sick or is injured, a committee, as-
sisted by Director Fuji, allows a suitable pension until recovery.
In the case, however, of long-standing disease or disability,
help is given, after ten years, from still another fund. This
employees' pension fund now amounts to $143,000, while
other funds given partly or wholly by the company include
$30,000 for operatives' sanitary fund, $112,000 in a fund "for
promoting operatives' welfare," and $15,000 for erecting an
operatives' sanatorium. The company also has a savings
department, paying 10 per cent, on long-time deposits made
by employees. There is an excellent theatre and dance hall
at the Tokyo plant, and I suppose at the other branches also,
and five physicians are regularly employed to look after the
health of operatives.
While the hours of labor in Japan generally are inexcusably
long and, as a rule, only two rest days a month are allowed, the
Kanegafuchi Company observes the Biblical seventh-day rest
with profitable results. The work hours are long yet, it is
true, ten hours having been the rule up to October 1, and now
nine and one half hours. The ten hours this summer embraced
the time from 6 to 6, with a half hour's rest from 9 to 9:30, one
hour from 11:30 to 12:30, and another half hour from 3 to 3:30:
a system of halfway rests not common in America, I believe.
Conditions at Kanegafuchi, of course, are not ideal, nor
would I hold them up as a general model for American mills.
Rather should America ask: "If Japan in a primitive stage of
industrial evolution is doing so much, how much more ought
we to do?" More noteworthy still is the fact that the senti-
ment of the country is loudly and insistently demanding a law
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES 3S
to stop the evils of child labor and night work for women,
which, on the whole, are undoubtedly bad — very bad.
The Kanegafuchi welfare work is exceptional, but it is in
line with the new spirit of the people.
That Japan with its factory system not yet extensive, its
people used to a struggle for existence tenfold harder than ours,
and with a population comprising only the wealthy or capitalist
class — that under such conditions, these Buddhist Japanese
should still make effective demand for adequate factory labor
legislation is enough to put to shame many a Christian state
in which our voters still permit conditions that reproach our
boasted chivalry and humanity. Perhaps all the changes
needed cannot be made at once without injury to manufactur-
ing interests, but in that case the law should at least require a
gradual and steady approach to model conditions — a distinct
step forward each six months until at the end of three years,
or five years at longest, every state should have a law as good
as that of Massachusetts.
Tokyo, Japan.
DOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE
WHITE MAN'S TRADE?
WITH all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's
doors and labor to be had for a mere song — four
fifths of her cotton-factory workers, girls and
women averaging 13| cents a day, and the male
labor averaging only 22 cents — it is simply useless for Europe
and America to attempt to compete with her in any line she
chooses to monopolize. Now that she has recovered from her
wars, she will doubtless forge to the front as dramatically as
an industrial power as she has already done as a military and
maritime power, while other nations, helpless in competition,
must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion's share
of Asiatic trade — the richest prize of twentieth-century
commerce."
In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English
and American manufacturers have talked for several years.
For the last few months, professing to see in Japan's adoption
of a high protective tariff partial confirmation of their predic-
tions, they have assumed added authority. Their arguments,
too, are so plausible and the facts as to Japan's low wage scale
so patent that the world has become acutely interested in the
matter. I account myself especially fortunate, therefore, in
having been able to spend several weeks under peculiarly favor-
able circumstances in a first-hand study of Japanese industrial
34
JAPANESE COMPETITION 35
conditions. I have been in great factories and business
offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreign manufac-
turers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had the
views of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire
as well as of the great captains of industry; I have talked
with several men who have served in the Emperor's cabinet,
including one who has stood next to the Mikado himself in
power; and at the same time I have taken pains to get the views
of English and American consular officials, commercial attaches
and travelers, and of newspaper men both foreign and
native.
And yet after having seen the big factories and the little
factory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened
to the most ambitious of Japan's industrial leaders, I shall
leave the country convinced of the folly of the talk that white
labor cannot compete with Japanese labor. I believe indeed
that the outlook is encouraging for manufacturing in the Mi-
kado's empire, but I do not believe that this development is
to be regarded as a menace to English or American industry.
Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upon
a radical misconception of conditions as they are.
In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's
rise as a military power and her predicted rise as an industrial
power should be branded as the groundless non sequiiur that
it is. "All our present has its roots in the past," as my first
Japanese acquaintance said to me, and we ignore fundamental
facts when we forget that for centuries unnumbered Japan
existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for the blossom. The
man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving, the end
of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, the Sam-
urai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce
was despised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated
as a necessary evil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and
Mukden we have no modern Minerva springing full-armed
from the head of Jove, but rather an unrecognized Ulysses
36 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKENG UP
of ancient skill surprising onlookers merely ignorant of the
long record of his prowess. Viewed from the same historical
standpoint, however, industrial Japan is a mere learner,
unskilled, with the long and weary price of victory yet
to pay. ^
In the race she has to run, moreover, the Mikado-land has
no such advantages as many of our people have been led to
believe. In America it has long been my conviction that cheap
labor is never cheap; that so-called "cheap labor" is a curse to
any community — not because it is cheap but because it is
inefficient. The so-called cheap negro labor in the South,
for example, I have come to. regard as perhaps the dearest on
the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite prepared
to find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of
conditions in a primitive stage of industrial organization, I
thought that I might find cheap labor with all the advantages,
in so far as there are any, and few of the disadvantages, encoun-
tered elsewhere. But it is not so. An American factory owner
in Osaka, summing up his Job's trials with raw Japanese labor,
used exactly my own phrase in a newspaper article a few days
ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap." And all my investiga-
tions have convinced me that the remark is as applicable in
Japan as it is in America or England.
The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course,
amazingly low. The latest 1910 statistics, as furnished by
the Department of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American
money) of 40 cents for carpenters, Slj cents for shoemakers,
34 cents for blacksmiths, 25| cents for compositors, 19| cents
for male farm laborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12
cents for female. In the cotton factories I visited, those of
the better sort, the wages run from 5 cents a day for the young-
est children to 25 cents a day for good women workers. In
a mousselaine mill I was told that the average wages were
22| cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50 cents for
the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was
JAPANESE COMPETITION 37
for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher grade
of efficiency than the average.
But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well
known to him, it was my host in the first Japanese house to
which I was invited — one of the Emperor's privy councillors,
and a man of much travel and culture who had studied commer-
cial conditions at home and abroad rather profoundly — who
expressed the conclusion that Japanese factory labor when
reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly cheaper than
European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite in
view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old
handicrafts and family industries to which our people have
been accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world,
but the moment we turn to modern industrial machinery on a
large scale the newness of our endeavor tells against us in a
hundred hindering ways. Numbers of times I have sought to
work out some industrial policy which had succeeded, and
could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or America,
only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered
elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of
industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with
a record for continuous government unsurpassed by any Euro-
pean country, our political and military achievements are but
the fruitage of our long history, but in industry we must simply
wait through patient generations to reach the stage repre-
sented by the Englishman, Irishman, or German, who takes to
machinery as if by instinct."
All my investigations since have confirmed the philosophy
of this distinguished Japanese whose name, if I should mention
it, would be familiar to many in America and England. In the
Tokyo branch of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company (a com-
pany which controls 300,000 spindles) the director, speaking
from the experience of one of the greatest and best conducted
industries in Japan, declared: "Your skilled factory laborers
in America or England will work four sides of a ring frame;
38 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
our unskilled laborer may work only one." A young English-
man in another factory declared: "It takes five men here to
do work that I and my mate would take care of at home."
An American vice-consul told me that it takes three or four
times as much Japanese as foreign labor to look after an equal
number of looms. A Japanese expert just back from Europe
declared recently that "Lancashire labor is more expensive
than ours, but really cheaper." Similarly the Tokyo corre-
spondent of the London Times, summing up an eight-column
review of Japanese industry, observed: "If we go to the bottom
of the question and consider what is being paid as wages and
what is being obtained as the product of labor in Japan, we may
find that Japanese labor is not cheaper than in other countries."
II
My own convinction is that in actual output the Japanese
labor is somewhat cheaper than American or European labor,
but not greatly so, and that even this margin of excess in com-
parative cheapness represents mainly a blood-tax on the lives
and energies of the Japanese people, the result of having no
legislation to restrain the ruinous overwork of women and
little children — a grievous debt which the nation must pay
at the expense of its own stamina and which the manufacturers
must also pay in part through the failure to develop experi-
enced and able-bodied laborers. The latest "Japan Year
Book" expresses the view that "in per capita output two or
three skilled Japanese workers correspond to one foreign,"
but under present conditions the difficulty here is to find the
skilled workers at all. When Mr. Oka, of the Department of
Commerce and Agriculture, told me that the average Japanese
factory hand remains in the business less than two years, I
was astonished, but inquiry from original sources confirmed the
view. With the best system of welfare work in the empire,
the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half
JAPANESE COMPETITION 39
to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employ-
ing 2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at
work as long as three years. Under such conditions, the
majority of the operatives at any time must be in a stage of de-
plorable inexperience, and it is no wonder that the "Year Book"
just quoted goes on to confess that "one serious defect of the
production is lack of uniformity in quality — attributed to
unskilled labor and overwork of machinery."
The explanation of this situation, of course, is largely to be
found in the fact that Japanese industries are women's indus-
tries — there being seven times as large a proportion of women
to men, the Department of Commerce informs me, as in Eu-
ropean and American manufacturing. These women workers
are mostly from the country. Their purpose is only to work
two or three years before getting married, and thousands of
them, called home to marry the husbands their parents have
selected, or else giving way physically under strain, quit work
before their contracts expire. "We have almost no factory
laborers who look on the work as a life business," was an
expression often repeated to me.
Not only in the mills, but in numerous other lines of work,
have I seen illustrations of the primitive stage of Japan's indus-
trial efficiency. As a concrete illustration I wish I might pass
to each reader the box of Kobe-made matches on the table
before me (for match-making of this sort is an important
industry here, as well as the sort conducted through matri-
monial middlemen without waiting for the aid or consent of
either of the parties involved). I have never in my life seen
such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxes at
home would you find so many splinters without heads, so many
defective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves,
I am told that it takes five or six hands to equal the product
of one skilled foreign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese
servants to do the work of one white servant" is the general
verdict of housekeepers, while it has also been brought to my
40 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAEING UP
attention that in shops two or three clerks are required to do
the work of one at home. A Japanese newspaper man (his
paper is printed in English) tells me that linotype compositors
set only half as many ems per hour as in America. In short,
the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what
I have written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of
Japanese cheap labor, the captain of the steamer on which
I came from America, rather spoiled his enthusiasm for getting
his ship coaled at Nagasaki for 7| cents a ton, by acknowledg-
ing that if it rained he should have to keep his ship waiting a
day to get sufficient hands.
Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced
into longer hours than labor anywhere else — eleven hours at
night this week, eleven hours in the day next week — I am con-
vinced that the people as a whole are more than ordinarily
averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted toil. "We have a streak
of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor said to me, "and
we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people are not
workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried."
Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese
artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption,
and the people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and
carefulness into the new environment of European machinery.
"Take the Tokyo street cars," said an ex-cabinet officer to me;
" the wheels are seldom or never cleaned or oiled, and are haK
eaten by rust." The railroads are but poorly kept up; the tele-
phones exhaust your patience; while in the case of telegraphing,
your exasperation is likely to lose itself in amazed amusement.
A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram from Osaka to
Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow train to
start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of my
message before it did.
In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth a
satisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said,
and that is that we should not put the blame wholly on the
JAPANESE COMPETITION 41
wage-earner. Not a small proportion of the responsibility-
lies at the door of inexpert managers. The family system of
production has not only been the rule for generations with
that minority of the people not engaged in farming, but it is
still the dominant type of Japanese industry, and it will take
time even to provide opportunities for training a sufficient
corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production.
In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is
not proving so abnormally profitable, I may question whether
Japanese factories have paid as good dividends, in proportion
to prevailing rates of interest on money, as factories in England
and America. Baron Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese finan-
ciers and one of the pioneers in cotton manufacturing, is my
authority for the statement that 12 per cent, would be a rather
high estimate of the average rate of dividend, while figures
furnished by the Department of Finance show that for ten
years the average rate of interest on loans has been 11.25 per
cent.
The fact that Western ideas as to Japan's recent industrial
advance have been greatly exaggerated may also be demon-
strated just here. While the latest government figures show
that in twelve years the number of female factory operatives
increased from 261,218 to 400,925 and male factory operatives
from 173,614 to 248,251, it is plain that a manufacturing popu-
lation of 649,000 in a country of 50,000,000 souls is small, and
the actual progress has not been so great as the relative figures
would indicate. Moreover, many so-called "factories" employ
less than ten persons and would not be called factories at all
in England or America. The absence of iron deposits is a
great handicap, the one steel foundry being operated by the
government at a heavy loss, and in cotton manufacturing, where
"cheap labor" is supposed to be most advantageous, no
very remarkable advance has been made in the last decade.
From 1899 to 1909 English manufacturers so increased their
trade that in the latter year they imported $222 worth of raw
42 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
cotton for every $100 worth imported ten years before, while
Japan in 1909 imported only $177 worth for each $100 worth
a decade previous — though of course she made this cotton
into higher grade products.
Ill
It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in Japan
are steadily increasing and will continue to increase. More
significant than the fact of the low cost per day, to which I have
already given attention, is the fact that these wages represent
an average increase per trade of 40 per cent, above the wages
eight years previous. The new 1910 "Financial and Economic
Annual" shows the rate of wages of forty-six classes of labor
for a period of eight years. For not one line of labor is a de-
crease of wages shown, and for only two an increase of less
than 30 per cent.; sixteen show increases between 30 and 40
per cent., seventeen between 40 and 50 per cent,, eight
from 50 to 60 per cent., three from 60 to 70 per cent., whUe
significantly enough the greatest increase, 81 per cent., is for
female servants, a fact largely due to factory competition. In
Osaka the British vice-consul gave me the figures for the
latest three-year period for which figures have been published,
indicating in these thirty-six months a 30 per cent, gain in the
wages of men in the factories and a 25 per cent, gain in the
wages of women.
Of no small significance in any study of Japanese industry
must also be the fact that there are in Japan proper a full half
million fewer women than men (1910 figures: men, 25,639,581;
women, 25,112,338) — a condition the reverse of that obtaining
in almost every other country. Now the young Japanese
are a very home-loving folk, and even if they were not, almost
all Shinto parents, realizing the paramount importance of hav-
ing descendants to worship their spirits, favor and arrange early
marriages for their sons. And what with this competition for
JAPANESE COMPETITION 43
wives, the undiminished demand for female servants, and a
half million fewer women than men to draw from, the outlook
for any great expansion of manufacturing based on woman
labor is not very bright. Moreover, with Mrs. Housekeeper
increasing her frantic bids for servants 81 per cent, in eight
years, and still mourning that they are not to be had, it is
plain that the manufacturer has serious competition from this
quarter, to say nothing of the further fact that the Japanese
girls are for the first time becoming well educated and are
therefore likely to be in steadily increasing demand as office-
workers. Upon this general subject the head of one of Osaka's
leading factories said to me: "I am now employing 2500women,
but if I wished to enlarge my mill at once and employ 5000,
it would be impossible for me to get the labor, though I might
increase to this figure by adding a few hundred each year for
several years."
Unquestionably, too, shorter hours, less night work, weekly
holidays, and better sanitary conditions must be adopted by
most manufacturers if they are to continue to get labor. The
Kobe Chronicle quotes Mr. Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau,
as saying that "most of the women workers are compelled
to leave the factories on account of their constitutions being
wrecked " after two or three years of night work, consumption
numbering its victims among them by the thousands. Either
the mills must give better food and lodging than they now
provide or else they must pay higher wages directly which will
enable the laborers to make better provision for themselves.
Yet another reason why wages must continue to advance is
the steady increase in cost of living, due partly to the higher
standard developed through education and contact with
Western civilization, but perhaps even more largely to the
fearful burden of taxation under which the people are stagger-
ing. A usual estimate of the tax rate is 30 per cent, of one's
income, while Mr. Wakatsuki, late Japanese Financial Com-
missioner to London, is quoted as authority for the statement
44 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAE3NG UP
that the people now pay in direct and indirect taxes, 35 per
cent, of their incomes. And I doubt whether even this esti-
mate includes the increased amounts that citizens are forced to
pay for salt and tobacco as a result of the government mon-
opoly in these products, or the greatly increased prices of sugar
resulting from the government's paternalistic eflForts to guar-
antee prosperity to sugar manufacturers in Formosa.
IV
Higher still, and higher fpi' than anything the nation has
ever yet known, must go the cost of living under the new
tariff law. From a British textile representative I learned the
other day that a grade of English woollens largely used by the
Japanese for underwear will cost over one third more under
the new tariff, while the increased duty on certain other lines
of goods is indicated by the table herewith:
PERCENTAGE OF DUTY TO COST OF ARTICLE
Old Tariff New Tariff
Printed goods 3 22
White lawns 10 47
Shirtings 10 39
Cotton Italians 8 35
Poplins 8 19
Brocades 10 22
Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its boot-
straps. The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire
seem to me to realize even now that through the new tariff
Japanese industry, as a whole, is likely to lose much more by
lessened ability to compete in foreign markets than it will
gain by shackled competition in the home markets. Far-
seeing old Count Okuma, once Premier, and one of the empire's
Elder Statesmen, seemed to realize this more fully than any
other man I have seen. "Within two or three years from the
time the new law goes into force," he declared, "I am confi-
JAPANESE COMPETITION 46
dent that its injurious effects will be so apparent that the
people will force its repeal. With our heavy taxes the margin
of wages left for comfort is already small, and with the cost
of living further increased by the new tariff, wages must inevi-
tably advance. This will increase the cost of our manufac-
tured products, now exported mostly to China, India, and
other countries requiring cheap or low-grade goods, and where
we must face the competition of the foremost industrial nations
of the world. As our cost of production increases, our compe-
tition with Europe will become steadily more difficult and a
decrease in our exports will surely follow. It is folly for one
small island to try to produce everything it needs. The tariff
on iron, for example, can only hamper every new industry
by increasing the cost of machinery, and must especially hinder
navigation and shipbuilding, in which we have made such
progress." Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular
dailies are as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the
Kobe Chronicle declares that, with diminished exports to
Japan, "British manufacturers will find compensation in the
lessened ability of the Japanese to compete in China; and
Japan will find that she has raised prices against herself and
damaged her own efficiency."
That such will be the net result of Japan's new policy seems
to me to admit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special
lines of British and American manufacture may suffer, but,
on the whole, what the white man's trade loses in Japan will
be recompensed for in China and India. Even after Japan's
adoption of the moderately protective tariff of 1899 her export
of yarns to China — in the much discussed "market right at
her doors " — dropped from a product of 340,000 bales to a
recent average of 250,000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according
to the latest published government figures, the number of
employees in Japanese cotton factories increased only 240 —
one third of 1 per cent. — or from 73,985 to 74,225, to be exact,
while I have already alluded to the figures showing the compara-
46 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
tive English and Japanese imports of raw cotton from 1890 to
1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Japan
in this period going from $30,000,000 to $54,000,000, or 77
per cent,, while England's advance was from $135,000,000 to
$300,000,000, or 122 per cent. The increase in England's
case, of course, was largely, and in Japan's case almost wholly,
due to the increased price of the cotton itself, but the figures
are none the less useful for the purposes of comparison.
In the frequent attempts of the Japanese Government to
stimulate special industries by subsidies and special privileges
there is, it seems to me, equally as httle danger to the trade of
Europe and America in general (though here, too, special
industries may suffer now and then), because Japan is in this
way simply handicapping herself for effective industrial growth.
Just at this writing we have an illustration in the case of the
Formosan sugar subsidy which seems to have developed into
a veritable Frankenstein; or, to use a homelier figure, the gov-
ernment seems to be in the position of the man who had the
bear by the tail, with equal danger in holding on or letting go.
Already, as a result of the system of subsidies, bounties and
special privileges, individual initiative has been discouraged,
a dangerous and corrupting alliance of government with busi-
ness developed, public morals debased (as was strikingly brought
out in the Dai Nippon sugar scandal), and the people, as Mr.
Sasano, of the Foreign Department, complains, now "rely on
the help of the government on all occasions." On the same
point the Tokyo Keizai declares that "the habit of looking to
the government for assistance in all and everything, oblivious
of independent enterprise . . . has now grown to the
chronic stage, and unless it is cured the health and vitality of
the nation will ultimately be sapped and undermined."
As for increasing complaints of "low commercial morality"
brought against Japanese merchants, that is not a matter of
concern in this discussion, except in so far as it may prove a
form of Japanese commercial suicide. But to one who holds
JAPANESE COMPETITION 47
the view, as I do, that the community of nations is enriched
by every worthy industrial and moral advance on the part of
any nation, it is gratifying to find the general alarm over the
present undoubtedly serious conditions, and it is to be hoped
that the efforts of the authorities will result in an early change
to better methods.
Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day
Japanese industry, and in no point do I find any material
menace to the general well-being of American and European
trade. It is my opinion that the Japanese will steadily develop
industrial efficiency, but that in the future no more than in
the present will Japan menace European and American indus-
try (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantages in
Manchuria, Korea, etc.), for just in proportion as efficiency
increases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking,
wages and standards of living will advance. The three —
efficiency, wages, cost of living — seem destined to go hand in
hand, and this has certainly been the experience thus far.
And whatever loss we may suffer by reason of Japan gradually
supplanting us in certain cruder forms of production should
be abundantly compensated for in the better market for our
own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people
of increasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living.
In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little
reason to fear any disastrous competition from Japan. Perhaps
she has been allowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria
or elsewhere, but that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another
story.
Kobe, Japan.
VI
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM, AND CHRISTIANITY
IN JAPAN
ONE of the most fascinating places in all Japan is
Kyoto, the old capital of the empire, and one of
its most picturesque and historic cities. Without
great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without
the political importance of Tokyo, and without shipping
advantages such as have made Kobe and Yokahoma famous,
Kyoto is noted rather for conserving the life of old Japan.
Here are the family industries, the handicrafts, and a hundred
little arts in which the Land of the Rising Sun excels.
Little themselves in stature, the people of Japan are best
in dealing with little things requiring daintiness, finish, and
artistic taste. Some one has said that their art is "great in
little things and little in great things," and unlike many
epigrams, it is as true as it is terse.
A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or
"stores," as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys,
lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or
another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic
or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and house-
hold articles which in America would be raw and plain in their
obvious practicality. The room in which I write is a fine
illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods,
entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain
touches and bits of wood carving that make it a work of art.
Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose
48
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 49
books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accu-
rate, are nevertheless too valuable to be neglected by any
student of Japan:
"It ha3 been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ
every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design
an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger
way, of all things in a Japanese home; even such articles of common use as
a bronze candlestick, a brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo
curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fit-
ness entirely xmknown to Western cheap production."
Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples,
Buddhist and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just
here the difference between these two faiths that were long
merged into one, but have been dissociated since the restora-
tion of the Emperor to his old-time powers forty years ago.
Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of ancestor-worship,
with its doctrine of the divine descent of the Mikado from the
Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful adherent
make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's ancestors.
With the future life or with moral precepts for this life it
does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your
own instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as
it may be caUed a religion at all: the tendency is to consider
it only a form of patriotism and not a religion.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of
theology comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting
upon much ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it
may have to do with practical morals. "The fact is, we Jap-
anese have never gotten our morals from our religion," said
one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me in Tokyo. "What
moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor Bud-
dhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics."
Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted
religious theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly de-
50 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKLNG UP
generated into a shameless mockery of its former self. To
read Sir Edwin Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism
in his "Light of Asia," and then see practical Buddhism in
Japan with all its superstitions and idolatries, is very much
like hearing bewitched Titania's praise of her lover's beauty
and then turning to see the long ears and hairy features of
the ass that he has become.
Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold him-
self coming to Buddhist Japan dropped Into open and flagrant
immoralities such as a Christian community would never
have tolerated, while the foremost American-bred apologists
for Buddhism here have been but little better. One of the
greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more notorious
right now for the vices of its sacred (.'') officials than for any vir-
tues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the Emperor
himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some
Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least
an outward reformation of their organization, but the dif-
ficulties are such as to make the success of the undertaking
very improbable. With the usual Japanese quality of imi-
tativeness they have started "Young Men's Buddhist Asso-
ciations," "Sunday schools,'* etc., and are also beginning to
follow the example set by the Christians of participating in
philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service
I attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a
raised altar in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged
about him, and the general service, as usual, was much as if
they had copied the Catholic ritual.
After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian ser-
vice at the Congregational School, or Doshisha, where the
sound of the American-born minister's voice was punctuated
by the street sounds of whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy
getas of passing Buddhists, while outside the window I could
see the bamboo trees and the now familar red disk and white
border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was offered for "the
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 51
President of the United States, the King of Great Britain,
the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan."
At night I was even more interested, even though I could
not understand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended
for half an hour. Although there was a downpour of rain
the chapel was comfortably filled and the faces of the wor-
shippers, I thought, were of more than ordinary intelligence and
promise, while their sincerity is illustrated by the fact that
numbers of the women Christians are actually depriving them-
selves of suitable food in order to give money for erecting a
larger church building.
The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in
his home one of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and
common throughout the empire forty odd years ago, pro-
hibiting Christianity, the ancient penalty being nothing less
than death itself. The explanation of this notice is found in
a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago the Cath-
olics came here, started missions, and made many converts
among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also
to become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the
first English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were
from 600,000 to 1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual,
away over here in Japan. Seven years later, however, govern-
ment persecution began, Christianity was put under the ban,
and so remained until eight years after our Civil War ended.
Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in this
long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly
handed their faith down from father to son through all the
long generations until tolerance came again.
Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885
an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came
to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, dis-
covered for the first time that a man might be a Christian with-
out being punished, and then confessed that each day he
had worshipped secretly at a little Catholic shrine hidden in
52 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
his wall, as his father and his father's father had done before
him.
As another illustration of the changed attitude toward
Christianity, I may mention that a Japanese Buddhist once
came to Doctor Hail's services armed with a dagger to kill
the preacher, but had his attention caught by the sermon
while waiting his chance and is now a missionary himself!
Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a
greater change than in the general estimate of woman, although
this is an objection the natives openly urge against Christianity.
Just as in any conflict of interest the family in Japan has been
everything and the individual nothing, so in every disagree-
ment between husband and wife his opinions count for every-
thing, hers for nothing. The orthodox and traditional Jap-
anese view as to a woman's place has been very accurately
and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanese
moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman":
"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her
husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear and
trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and forwardness. A
woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself and never
weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband, and thus escape celestial
castigation."
Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is
declared:
"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, dis-
content, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five maladies infest seven or
eight out of every ten women, and it is from these that arises the inferiority
of women to men."
The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one
or two amusing incidents — amusing in one aspect and pa-
thetic in another — that are of interest in this connection.
A Japanese member of her church declared: "No, no, Mrs.
THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA
J This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the statue's
feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene contemplation for which the
Buddhist religion stands; is indeed, hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy
Nirvana which it teaches is the goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer
piece of statuary in the East than this
THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK
The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men
together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground,
and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful of earth!
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 55
Hail, you can't ever make me believe that my wife is as good
as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching a Sunday-
school class concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked:
"Why did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And
the Japanese answer was: "Because he was going to talk on
intellectual things and she needed some man to help her
understand ! "
Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells
of tying his wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only
to find the Japanese amazed that a man should so humble
himself. His wife's taking his arm in walking was also re-
garded as the height of impropriety!
No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity
of woman, probably because no religion has ever recognized
the worth of the individual. Just as I have said, that in the
old days, and almost as largely to-day, in the relations of the
home, it was the family that counted and not the individual,
so in his relations to the larger world beyond the individual
formerly counted for nothing when weighed against the wishes
of the superior classes. In the earliest days, when the lord
died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait
upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object
in view, wives and servants committed suicide on the death
of the master. Even now it is regarded as honorable for a
girl to sell herself into shame to save the family from want.
The same antipodal difference between East and West —
here "the family is tlie social unit" and with us the individual
himself — explains the system of adoption : a younger son not
being essential to the maintenance of the family cult may be
adopted into another family, while the eldest son may not.
On the same principle the father rules, not because of what he
represents as an Individual, but because he represents the
Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must then
join his other children in obeying the eldest son.
In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of individ-
56 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
ual rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for
centuries the smallest details of everyday life were regulated
by law, but more seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged
class, might "cut down in cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or
a farmer on the slightest provocation, or simply for the purpose
of testing his sword," while in case of the ruin of their cause
it was the honorable and natural thing for soldiers to commit
"hari-kiri" — that is to say, commit suicide by disemboweling
themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that "the
value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christian
spirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned
as an example that formerly suicide, in such circumstances
as I have mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now
it is regarded as a sin."
Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influ-
ences the peoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers
behave like fatalists because the fundamental basis of the
social order for centuries has been the necessity of the Individ-
ual to sacrifice pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required
either by the Family or by the Social Order. And this
partially explains why it is said in sober earnest that the
highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboys to-day is to
die for their Emperor. ^^^^^
This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will
be from Korea — if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been
raging in Osaka and in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought
it necessary to visit in order to get first-hand information about
industrial conditions. Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives
only a few hours. The first day's record here in Kobe, I
believe, showed six cases and five deaths. Gradually, however,
cholera is being stamped out, just as we have eradicated yel-
low fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall event-
ually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any
town as a disgrace — an evidence of primitive and uncivilized
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 57
sanitary conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka
in 1879 tells me that there were 10,000 cholera victims in that
one city that year — the yellow flag on almost every street,
and all through the night the sound of men hurrying past
with new victims for the hospitals or with new corpses for the
burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than 313,000
Japanese died of the scourge.
I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously
interesting country. For just as America represents the
ultimate type of Occidental civilization, so does Japan rep-
resent the ultimate type of Oriental civilization.
More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and
Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human
history. For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced
across the plains and peaks of Asia, finding at last in these
outlying islands his farthermost outpost, and so tarried here
in the Farthest East, "the Land of the Rising Sun." He
hardly thought of the existence of a West, but if his Buddha-
like composure had been ruffled by such a thought, he might
have droned monotonously:
" Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."
But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily east-
ward, the white man, starting from the land of the Euphrates,
had pitched his camp, with each succeeding generation, nearer
and nearer the setting sun. Greece — Rome — Spain —
France — England — then four hundred years ago, more rest-
less than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that
hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. West-
ward still the course of empire then continued until in our time
the white man planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.
There was no more West.
Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct
deeper than reason, the white man sent his messengers across
the new-found ocean and awakened the Sleepy World
58 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
of the Yellow Man by the booming of Perry's guns off
Yokahoma.
The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with
observation, and the deeper meaning of the greatest events
in human history may often escape the attention of contem-
poraries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and
thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked not merely
a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of
human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how
the strange world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a
stage-setting in keeping with its dramatic significance. Not
to England, nor to any other great naval and commercial
Power of the time, but to the young United States — the
nation that had found the ultimate West — came the un-
likely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East
to Western trade and thought.
When at last the world has grown old and nations and
empires not yet formed shall themselves have gone the mortal
way common alike to human creatures and human creations,
I think the far historian will record few events either more
dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of meaning than
Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five years after
the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old
drama of our westward march.
So to-day, as I have said, the fuU tides of Orient and
Occident have rushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a
land of curious customs and strange phenomena, but a land
in which the contrasts exist side by side, and most interesting of
all, a land of strangely mingling social and industrial currents.
East and West have met, and we wait to see what forces
in each shall prevail when the shock of their fierce encounter
shall have passed. For it is not merely Japan, but all Asia,
whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new, tense
struggle here between the ideals of West and East.
As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the Japanese
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 59
in European dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams
of men in coats and trousers and shoes mingle with men wear-
ing kimonas, hikamas, and getas, so in the minds of the people
the teachings of modern science and Confucian classic meet;
the faith of the Christian grapples with the faith of the Bud-
dhist; the masterful aspirations of Western civilization surge
against the old placidity of the East.
What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems
to me, depends so much as upon the religious foundation
upon which Japan seeks to build the structure of her newer
and richer life. Many of her people, if I may change the
figure, are seeking to put the new wine of Christian civili-
zation into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist ritualism.
That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others,
like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep
away all religion, but they will find that they are fighting against
an ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving
of the divine in man.
In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to con-
vince me of the truth of both the foregoing observations. I
confess that I came to the country with a distinct doubt as
to the wisdom of stressing mission work here — came think-
ing the field less promising then elsewhere. But I go away
with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has dis-
pelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a
student of social and industrial conditions, I believe that
to-day Japan needs nothing more than Christian missionaries
— men who are willing to forget dogma and tradition and
creedal differences in emphasizing the fundamental teachings
of Christ Himself, and who have education, sympathy, and
vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping mold a
new and composite type of human civilization, a type which
may ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of
our human race.
Kobe, Japan.
VII
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM"
HAVE become a contemporary of David and the patri-
archs of Israel. In the civiHzation into which I have
come science and invention are in swaddhng clothes, the
Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of Western
Europe still in the womb of Time.
This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan,
I am travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning
Calm" — or " Chosen," as the Japanese will call it hereafter
— whose authentic recorded history runs back into the
twelfth century before the Christian era, and whose general
features must have changed but little in all this time. A
typical Korean view of the present year might well be pho-
tographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old
Testament.
The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks har-
nessed in the primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their
plow stocks are of wood rough-hewn from their native forest
trees, the plowman here never standing between the "plow-
handles," as we say, because there is only one handle and that
little better than a stick of firewood. With sickles equally
pr'aiitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the fields;
with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly high
enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock
walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or
on which immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the
autumn sun. Nor would the dress of the people — every-
60
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 61
body in white (or what was once white) garments — have
seemed strange in ancient Judea.
There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible
pictures of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night,
as October's hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint
light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts,
and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has
seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by
such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive. Rather,
in looking out over the picturesque mountains and valleys
and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the wild" in
your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone
nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are
moved to take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony
and pitch your camp out under the great stars — larger and
brighter indeed do they seem to burn here in the Orient —
and feel the dew on your face as you awaken in the "morning
calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life was
snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few
short months ago.
As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less
fascinating than the country through which I had travelled
during the day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any elec-
tric glare, strangely robed, almost spirit-like white figures
were gliding here and there in the moonlight, singly or in
groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our rickshaws brought
us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead era is it,
relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of massive
stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail
from Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar.
In Japan I found a different world from that which I had
known, but a world in which East and West were strangely
mingled: much of the famihar with the unfamiUar. Here in
Korea, on the contrary, I have found the real East, the Asia
of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by
62 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Western influences — dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet
with a fascination all its own. Great bare mountains look
down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their
steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent
valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little
higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a tower-
ing skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little
two-story studio building on the main street of the city. Prac-
tically every other building is but little higher and not greatly
larger as a rule, than the pens in which our American farmers
fatten hogs in the fall. Most American merchants would
expect to make more in a day than the average white-robed,
easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he smokes his
long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world
and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course,
although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital
of a kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city
their home; no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few
horses. There are miserable little overloaded ponies that the
average farmer would feel that he could pitch single-handed
into his barn-loft, but the burden-carriers are mostly bulls
that are really magnificent in appearance, both oxen and ponies
carrying loads on their backs that an American would expect
to crush them.
The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw
hats as a badge of mourning, but the usual style of head-dress
is to shave the extreme summit of the head, while the rest of
the hair grows long and is braided up in a sort of topknot
with a little bird-cage hat above it. This hat is then tied under
the chin as an American woman would tie hers.
Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them
to stay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when
on the street are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown
over their heads and shoulders that leaves only their eyes and
contiguous facial territory exposed. The tourist is at first
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 63
inclined to think that there are many young girls on the streets,
but this is because the boys dress as we have grown used to
seeing girls dress in America. Take the young boy who waits
on my table: fair of feature in his neat white dress, and with
a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back, you would
think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married
a little later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave
his head (not necessarily as a sign of mourning !) and wear his
hair thereafter in the manner described in the preceding para-
graph. An English missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here
yesterday (and how pretty an English or American girl does
look in this far land !) told me that a Korean girl of twenty or
twenty-one is regarded as a rather desperate old maid, and
the go-betweens, who arrange the mamages here as they do
in Japan, are likely to charge a rather steep sum for getting a
husband for one so far advanced in spinsterhood ! The chances
are that the groom doesn't see his bride until the ceremony,
and she doesn't even see him then, for according to the curious
custom here the bride's eyes are sealed up until late after-
noon of her wedding day. More than this, custom requires
that the bride must keep absolutely unbroken silence all the
day long, and for a varying length of time thereafter. Mrs.
Bishop in her book on Korea asserts that "it may be a week
or several months before the husband knows the sound of his
wife's voice," — and the nature of the dear creatures in Amer-
ica will of course insure the ready acceptance of her statement !
The go-betweens are often not very scrupulous, and for
good fees sometimes manage to palm off damsels of unsatis-
factory features on unsuspecting swains, or match undesir-
able young fellows with girls vastly superior to them. A
rather amusing instance was reported to me by the young lady
from whom I have just quoted. One of the officials or noble-
men in Seoul had a daughter whom the go-between was pre-
paring to marry off into a family of rank in another city. A
few days before the wedding-day-set-to-be, some one came to
64 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
the father of the bride and said: "Did you know that your
prospective son-in-law has a hare-lip?" Now a hare-lip in
Korea is not merely such an undesirable addition to one's
countenance as to make a Mrs. Wiggs happy because of being
without it, but under the old dispensation no one with a hare-
lip, or other like facial blemish, could be presented at court
and thereby introduced into the Four Hundred of this capital
city. Therefore the father waxed though tf id from his top-
knot to the end of his long-stem pipe. "I tell you what I'll
do," he finally said to his wife. "We'll go ahead with the
ceremony, but instead of my daughter I'll substitute my orphan
niece." And he did, and the young fellow didn't know any
better for a week.
Fortunately, however, my story doesn't end here. I am
extremely glad to add the usual "lived-happily-ever-after"
peroration, for that was really what happened in this case.
The father of my young lady informant, who is a doctor, sewed
up the young fellow's hp, he was presented at court, and the
real daughter who so narrowly escaped marrying may be an
old maid, for all I know.
In such a high, dry climate as this one would expect to find
little tuberculosis, but I am told that there is really a great
deal of it, due to the carelessness of the families where there
are victims, and to the generally unsanitary conditions. A
daughter of one of the Southern missionaries here, having
contracted the malady, has just gone to Arizona in search of
cure. Everywhere on the streets I encounter faces marked by
smallpox, and formerly to have had the disease was the rule
rather than the exception. In fact, instead of alluding to a
man's inexperience by saying "He hasn't cut his eye teeth,"
as we do, a Korean would say: "He hasn't had smallpox."
Since vaccination became the rule, however, there are very
few cases.
Infant mortality here, as in America, is one of the greatest
factors in the high death-rate, but conditions are improving.
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 65
And so long as authorities declare that in America half the
infant death-rate is due to ignorance or neglect, we haven't
much right to point a scornful finger at Korea, anyhow.
I have already alluded to the fact that the old monarchial
government of Korea ended its inglorious career but a few
short months ago. While the records of the nation run back
more than three thousand years — probably to a period when
Job was so superbly reproaching his comforters in the Land of
Uz — the late dynasty runs back only 500 years. We Ameri-
cans, I may say in passing, are accustomed to think of men of
five hundred years ago, or even of John Smith and Pocahontas,
as very ancient, but a pedigree of only five hundred years
wouldn't entitle a family to enter good society over here. But
though only five hundred years in power, this recent dynasty
succeeded in doing about as much devilment and as little good
as many dynasties much older in years. One of the mission-
aries explained to me yesterday that it was only when the King
got very mad that he would order heads cut off without reason
— but then the Koreans are very lazy and his inactivity at
other periods may have been due to sloth.
The truth is, that most of these Oriental monarchies have
been corrupt beyond the belief of the average American.
When I was a boy I used to hear the old men in country churches
thank God for the blessings of orderly government and for the
privilege of worshipping as they chose, "with no one to molest
us or make us afraid." As a rule, we take such things as
matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia
and into countries where the people have been cursed by cor-
rupt governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon
the mere whim of the government, where property has been
confiscated with no better reason, and where men have had to
die for their faiths : — when he, in short, comes into lands
where the rights of neither life, property nor conscience have
been respected, he is likely to prize his American privileges
somewhat more highly.
66 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
The old Korean dynasty was not only corrupt, but unspeak-
ably stupid. Like the people, the King relied on sorcerers
or fortune-tellers to find a lucky day or a lucky time of the
moon to do whatever he wished, and in case of sickness con-
sulted the midang, or conjurer, instead of a doctor. Thus
when the prince had smallpox some years ago, the mutang
declared that the Smallpox Spirit or devil (who must always
be referred to with great respect as "His Excellency") would
not leave unless allowed to ride horseback clear to the Korean
boundary, three hundred miles away; and a gayly caparisoned
horse was accordingly led the entire distance for His Excel-
lency, the Smallpox Spirit, to ride away on!
The government was also unfeignedly corrupt. Offices were
given, just as lives were taken merely at the whim of the
Throne. Taxes were farmed out, the grafting collectors
taking from the people probably five or six times as much as
finally reached the public treasury. More than this, the
nobility robbed the people at will, and there was no authority
from whom they could get redress. Woe unto the man who
became energetic and industrious under the old dispensation!
First, the tax-gatherers would relieve him of the bulk of his
swollen fortune, and what was left the noble or "Yang-ban,"
as a noble was called, would take the trouble to borrow but
never take the trouble to repay. For the Yang-ban was a
"gentleman," he was. It was beneath his dignity to work —
even to guide the reins of the horse he rode — but it was not
beneath his dignity to sponge on his friends (I think the verb
"to sponge" is too expressive to remain slang) or to borrow
without repaying. Moreover, in case of extremity, it is said
that Mother Yang-ban and Sister Ann might take in washing,
as is recorded in the classic lays of our own land, but Father
never defiled himself by doing anything so dishonorable as
an honest day's work.
But alas and alack! for the degeneracy of our times. The
Yang-bans in Korea have been deprived of their ancient priv-
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 67
ileges, and I fear that even their fellows in America are by
no means treated with the ancient deference and respect due
to persons of such exalted merit and blue-blood.
What with the arbitrary and oppressive system of tax-robbery
and the extortions of the Yang-bans it is not surprising that
the Koreans here became disinclined to labor, while those
who went to Manchuria, where there has been "proper se-
curity for the gains of industry," are said to be quite a different
folk — energetic because there has been encouragement to
be energetic. The old Korean system of taxation being
arbitrary, the only way to escape a raid by the tax-gatherer
was to appear not to have anything worth raiding, and with
the coinage confined usually to the copper "cash" (each
"cash" worth a small fraction of a cent), it was difficult
for a man to have much money without everybody knowing
it. If a man had much he needed a warehouse to store it in.
Mrs. Bishop in her book, already referred to, speaks of a time
when it took 3200 "cash" to equal a dollar in our money,
making each coin worth 1-32 of a cent, and it took six men or
one pony to carry $50 worth of coin! Another instance is
mentioned in the Japanese official Year Book on Korea. The
Japanese army bought $5000 worth of timber in the interior,
where the people were not used to any other currency, with
the result that "the army had to charter a small steamer and
fill her completely with this copper cash to finance the trans-
action!" I bought a few long, necklace-like strings of this
old Korean money at ten cents a string, and even then prob-
ably paid too much.
When I bought my ticket for Korea it was nominally an
independent monarchy under a Japanese "protectorate,"
but the day before I sailed from San Francisco, Japanese
aggression took another step and the country was formally
annexed as a part of the Japanese Empire. There is little
doubt, I suppose, that the Japanese will give the Koreans
better government than the old monarchy gave them, but one
68 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
cannot excuse all the methods by which Japan fastened her
rule on the island. Yesterday morning I went out to the Old
North Palace, a deserted and melancholy memorial of van-
ished power, stood on the throne where Korean kings once
held audience, and saw the royal dwelling in which the Jap-
anese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895, and also saw the
place where they burned her body. The Japanese minister
at that time was recalled and placed on trial for the offence,
and, though he escaped conviction, the evidence of his guilt
was undoubted. It has been estimated that in about eighteen
months in 1907-'08, "12,916 Koreans, called 'insurgents' by
the Japanese and patriots by their fellow countrymen, were
killed by the Mikado's soldiers and gendarmes, only 160 of
whom lost their lives." This looks more like butchery than
war. Moreover, the Japanese themselves have to admit that
there were inexcusable delays in paying for land seized from
Koreans, and in \dew of all the circumstances it is questionable
whether the Korean hatred or dislike of Japan will become very
much less cordial than it is to-day.
Perhaps in no country in the world has missionary work
been more successful than in Korea (there are probably 125,000
Protestants now, while there were only 777 thirteen years
ago), and I have been interested to learn that there is abso-
lutely no truth in the Japanese newspaper reports that im-
mense numbers of native Christians are leaving the church
since annexation. On the contrary, reports from all over
the country are good, and Seoul itself is just now in the midst
of a most thoroughgoing and successful Christian revival, with
1800 conversions reported during the first ten days. At a
Methodist mission school I visited this morning I found that
a hundred of the native pupils had been canvassing the town
a part of three successive afternoons with the result that
they had brought in the names of 697 Koreans expressing a
desire to become Christians.
Here in Korea there is no waste of energy or money through
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 69
denominational divisions. Each denomination has its own
sphere of activity, preventing dupKcation of effort, and my
general observation has convinced me that the criticisms of
foreign mission work sometimes heard in America are based
on a radical misconception of conditions. Even the non-
Christians, in the great ^majority of cases, speak in high
praise of the isplendid work of the missionaries. A typical
expression is that found in the latest issue of the Shanghai
National Review, now before me, which may be expected to
speak impartially. Referring to an address by Doctor Mor-
rison, the Peking correspondent of the London Times, it says:
"Doctor Mon-ison eulogized the work of the missionaries and we cannot
conceive that anybody who really knows of their work at first hand, not as it
is to be foT'r>d in extreme cases, but as ordinarily carried on, should do other-
wise thni eulogize it."
Seoul, Korea.
VIII
MANCHURIA- FAIR AND FERTILE
NEASILY sleeps Mukden to-night" — I remember
yet how one of the dispatches began which brought
so vividly to my mind the meaning of the great
death-grapple here between the Japanese and Rus-
sian hosts in 1905.* The story in a nutshell is this :
" After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden,
where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from
February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in
modem history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men
were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Km-opatkin retreated in fairly good
order about a hundred miles north of Mukden."
So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle
five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have
come. What Gettsyburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden
was in the first great contest between the white race and the
Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his
gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the
* " Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night. In the main street lamps burn dimly.
Along dark roads in heavy dust are marching columns. The cool night is
full of the low rustle of movement. Near the station, in over-filled hospitals,
are heard low groans. The wounded arrive in a never-ceasing stream of carts,
and another stream of ambulances moves northward, for the place must be
cleared for to-day's victims. The eternal pines whisper above the Tombs of
Chinese Emperors. In the fields watch fires are burning stores and evacuated
villages " And the correspondent goes on to tell of the wearied forces
gathering for further fighting with the coming of dawn — men footsore and
weak for want of food and water and rest. For forty-eight hours the Japanese
had not eaten.
70
MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 71
windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles
of snowy trenches.
I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at
one time the Japanese thought themselves beaten in the battle
and had ordered a retreat, when, a Russian force giving way,
they turned quickly to press the advantage and snatched victory
from what they had thought was ruin. There are many stories,
too, of the inefficiency of the Russian officers, stories made all
the more probable in the light of the Russian Commander
Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect. "Why, the
English would put one of their admirals against the wall and
shoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of
duty as went entirely unpunished among Russian generals,"
was one man's comment as he talked with me. "The Roo-
shians were good fighters — fought 'and to 'and with the
butt of their muskets — and if they 'ad 'ad good commanders
the Japs would never have won," said an Englishman who
had seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the
debauchery and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable
women travelling regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness
being also common. About the same charges were reported
to me by a Japanese officer. In fact, it is said that the Japanese
contrived to get a very considerable quantity of champagne
to the Russian headquarters one day, and the next day made
a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossack com-
manders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much
drinking !
The truth is that the Japanese, from camp-followers to
commander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians
were not. From the day that Russia, aided by France and
Germany, forced Japan to cede back to China some of the fruits
of her victory over the Chinese, from that hour Japan nursed
and fed fat her rankling grudge and bided her time as deliber-
ately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was in Japan an
Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced Japan
72 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see the tre-
mendous interest in the military drills in all the Japanese
schools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank
answer: "We are getting ready to lick Russia."
It should also be observed that when the war came on the
Japanese were not only in a state of preparedness so far as
battleships and army drill and munitions of war were con-
cerned, but they were also prepared in the vital matter of proper
medical attendance.
"When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba
the army was utterly without proper medical corps and equip-
ment, and the death-rate was disgracefully high. But the first
Japanese who fell in crossing the Yalu were taken at once to
the best of Japanese surgeons and cared for in the most ap-
proved of modern military hospitals." So said a frank Scotch-
man to me yesterday, and in the hght of the official statistics
I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasant allusion to
America. When the war with Russia ended. Baron Takaki,
Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, boasted that whereas
in the Spanish-America War "fourteen men died from prevent-
able diseases to one man killed on the field of battle," the
Japanese had lost only one man from disease to every four from
bullets. Now the Japanese, as usual, had not worked out
any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and
hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable record,
but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the
white man's inventions and getting as much or more — more
in this case — out of them than the white man himseK.
The Japanese record, showing in such amazing fashion
what a wisely directed health organization may accomplish,
is worth remembering not only in connection with plans for
military efficiency, but also in connection with plans for general
public health activities at home. Every State should spend
five times as much for this public health work as at present.
In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces
MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 73
of the fierce contest that only five or six years ago scarred its
bosom, and the serried shocks of newly harvested corn, kaoliang
(sorghum) and millet — in some infrequent instances fertil-
ized by the dead men's bones — are seen on fields where con-
tending armies struggled. Let it be so for a little while; let
the Manchurian peasant sow and garner in peace while he may ;
for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China's Three Eastern
Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's blood may
redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended
is to me perfectly clear. By reason of the Japanese railroad
monopoly through the very heart of Southern Manchuria,
and her leased territory on the coast, Japan has obtained power
bordering on control, and everything goes to show that she
has fully made up her mind to complete and retain that control.
Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire,
it is easy to understand how it has now roused the covetousness
of Japan just as the temptation a few years ago proved too
strong for Russia. Immense farming areas are only thinly
settled; some of the richest of the world's mineral resources
have only been touched.
A day or two ago I went out to see Mr. Edward C. Parker,
in charge of the agricultural experiment farm here (he is a
Minnesota man, I believe), and found him enthusiastic over his
corn crop just harvested. "I have been so surprised by the
growth of corn this year," he declared, "that I could hardly
believe my own eyes. I have never seen finer seed ears any-
where." Among American states, only Iowa, he declares,
is probably more fertile than Manchuria; with stock-raising
to prevent land-deterioration, all the vast southern section
could beat Illinois growing crops, and the same thing could
be said of the northern country but for its colder climate.
About Harbin, where the South Manchuria Railway joins the
Trans-Siberian Line, one may see cuts thirty feet deep and the
soil rich to the bottom. Most of Manchuria is level — strik-
ingly like our Western Corn Belt and Wheat Belt — and the
74 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
soil is of wind-drift origin "like a great snow-blanket," very
easily tilled. The plowing is done with a steel-tipped wooden
beam such as I have already written of seeing in Korea, and
only the favoring physical texture of the soil explains the fat
harvests of food, feed, and fuel achieved under such methods.
It has been a positive joy to me in travelling through the
country here in late October to see the great shocks of kaoliang,
millet and corn (even with labor at 20 cents a day out here,
the people don't pull fodder!), quaint-looking farmhouses
almost surrounded by well-stuffed barns, and corn cribs packed
until the overflowing yellow ears spill out the ampler cracks.
The kaoliang is a sort of sorghum, the grain being used for
food, while the stalks, which contain but little sugar, are used
for fuel. Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit and
running over with
" The garnered largess of the fruitful year"
not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are
used in Manchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchu-
rian winters as well. I even find the peasants digging up the
roots and stubble to be dried and burned in the houses.
One sees but a small proportion of good horses here, and
practically no four-wheeled farm wagons. Unlike Japan, how-
ever, Manchuria does have its farm vehicles: great heavy
two-wheeled carts drawn by from two to eight horses, donkeys,
and asses. Sometimes there is a big horse or two, then one or
two donkeys half the size of the horses, and a couple of little
asses or burros half the size of the donkeys — and maybe a bull
thrown in for good measure. It looks as if the Whole Blamed
Family of work-stock had been hitched to pull the cart. The
Whole Blamed Family is often needed, too, for the roads in
China are ample proof that we needn't expect ours in America
or anywhere else to get any better by letting them alone three
thousand years. The Chinese have tried it, and it doesn't
work. The October roads are so bad in many places that if
MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 75
the carts had four wheels instead of two not even the combined
aggregation in the team could pull them out of the mud. A
little later, however, the roads freeze over solidly and stay so
for five or six months — and then the Manchurian farmers
go on long, slow pilgrimages carrying their products to the
larger markets — sometimes two or three hundred miles from
home.
The pride and glory of Manchuria, the talk of its citizens,
the foundation of its prosperity, the backbone of its commerce,
the symbol of its wealth, is the bean — the common soja, or
soy bean as we know it. What corn is to our Corn Belt and
what cotton is to our Southern States, that the bean is to Man-
churia: supreme among products. There is no class of people
not affected by the prosperity or the adversity of his Majesty
the Bean. Bankers, merchants, farmers, even the ladies one
meets in the drawing-rooms in the foreign concessions, not
only "know beans,*' but can talk beans too. If the present
rate of progress is maintained, it will not be long until no one
will enumerate the world's great crops — wheat, corn, oats,
rice, rye, barley, cotton, etc. — without including beans. The
first beans were shipped to Europe only about four years ago,
and the London Times correspondent estimates that next year
Europe will take $35,000,000 worth. In a very great measure
the beans have the same properties as cottonseed, an oil being
extracted that is used for much the same purposes as cotton-
seed oil, while the residue called "bean cake" is about the
equivalent of cottonseed meal. It is somewhat superior, Mr.
Parker says, to cottonseed meal or linseed meal as a stock
feed, but is now chiefly used for fertilizing purposes. My first
acquaintance with the bean cake was in Japan, where I found
it enriching the earth for vegetable-growing, Japan importing
an average of half a million tons a year to put under its crops.
Manchuria also uses not a little for the same purpose. The
more intelligent Manchurian farm^ers, however, are learning
that it is a waste to rot one of the best cattle feeds in the
76 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
world and get its fertilizing value only — just as our American
farmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to the
disgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producw
without first getting its other value as a meat-producer.
I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography
led me to believe was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China
or Mongolia alongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at
all, but chiefly a great grass plain with golden possibilities as
a cattle country. Mr. Parker declares that if cattle were
grown on these immense ranges and brought to Manchuria
in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake, millet, etc., Harbin,
Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities might soon
build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness.
This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of
maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those
sections of America where the policy of selling everything off
the land and putting nothing back threatens disaster.
The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up
as high as the little plows will permit and the crops planted on
top, is the general practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an
effort through the experiment farm to convince the people of
the advantages of level cultivation. He also wishes to intro-
duce better plows. "The truth is," he says, "that we never
had any real plows until James Oliver and John Deere invented
theirs. All the plowing before that was merely scratch-work,
and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than those
the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like,
wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly
make enough to subsist on."
In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and
in Manchuria I have also found a few patches, though the cli-
mate here is obviously too cold for its profitable production.
I find that the Japanese have great faith in the future of the
industry in Korea.
This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete
MANCHURIA- FAIR AND FERTILE 77
without some mention of the queer aspect of many of the
cultivated fields — thick- dotted with earth mounds, around
which the rows are curved and twisted, these mounds resembling
medium-sized potato hills. They contain not vegetables, how-
ever, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound is a Chinaman's
grave. I first noticed this method of burying in Korea, but
the mounds are quite low there — all that I saw, at least,
except the Queen's Tomb at Seoul. Here in Manchuria they
are about three or four feet high in most cases, and sometimes
six. One of the famous sights of Mukden is the Peilang, or
Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun, the first great Manchu
Emperor of China, lies buried, and the grave proper (reached
after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificent gates,
images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an
acre in extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty
feet high and surrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped
summit runs up about twenty feet higher. The Chinese have
a deep-rooted superstition as to the existence of a sort of devil
or "fung-shui" in the ground, and to disturb this fung-shui
may prove the direful spring of more "woes unnumbered"
than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed to exist
under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs,
and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking
had to nm twenty-five miles out of its proper course in order
not to disturb it.
Mukden, Manchuria.
IX
WHERE JAPAN IS ABSORBING AN EMPIRE
^ HE Open Door in Manchuria — of what concern
is it to me any more than the revolution in Portugal
or the Young Turks movement in Constantinople?"
With some such expression the average American
is likely to dismiss the question — a question whose determi-
nation may prove the pivot on which will swing the greatest
world-movements of our time as well as the prosperity of many
European and American industries, and that of the labor de-
pendent upon them.
Concerning Manchuria and all the issues involved in the
present struggle for its possession, all kinds of misconceptions
are rife. That it is a small country; that It is an infertile
country; that it must be already well developed in point of
population and consumption of goods: this is only the ABC
of Manchurian misinformation.
In answer, it need only be said that Manchuria is larger
than all our New England, Middle, and South Atlantic States
from Maine to Georgia Inclusive, and that Into Its borders all
of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), together with
all of the German Empire, could be crowded, and still leave a
gap so big that Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland would lack
thousands of square miles of filling it: while as to population
Manchuria has only 18,000,000 people as compared with
78
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 79
118,000,000 in the European countries just mentioned. And
after having travelled in all of them as well as in Manchuria
I should say that the Asiatic area is the more fertile.
The possibilities of such an empire situated in the fairest
portion of Asia's temperate zone are simply illimitable. No one
who has been through the fruitful lands of the American Corn
Belt and Wheat Belt and goes later through Manchuria can
fail to note the similarity between them in physical appear-
ance and natural resources, and it may well be that what the
settlement of the West has meant in America these last fifty
years the development of Manchuria will mean in Asia these
next fifty.
In itself the sheer creation of such a country — larger far
than Great Britain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Mani-
toba — would appeal at once to American commerce and in-
dustry, but you have only begun to grasp the significance of
Manchuria when you compare it to the creation of such an
empire in some favored portion of the sea.
Manchuria means all this, but it means more : Its possession
would give such vastly increased influence to any Power pos-
sessing it as to make that Power a menace to the commercial
rights of all other nations in Asia — rights of almost vital
importance both to Europe and America. England and Ger-
many, of course, are already dependent upon foreign trade for
their prosperity, and President McKinley was never so seer-
like as when, in his last speech at Buffalo, he reminded the
American people that their own future greatness depends upon
the development of trade beyond the seas. And it was to Asia,
the greatest of continents, and especially to China, the greatest
of countries on this greatest of continents, that he looked,
as we must also look to-day. In Secretary Hay's memorial
address on McKinley, which I had the good fortune to hear,
the dead President's determined efforts to maintain the ancient
integrity of the Dragon Empire were fittingly mentioned as one
of his most distinguished services to his people and his time.
80 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
To keep the immense area of China from spoliation by other
nations and to preserve to all peoples equal commercial rights
within boundaries are absolutely essential to the proper future
development of both European and American commerce and
industry.
II
This is why the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of very
real concern to every Occidental citizen; this is why the other
nations after the ending of the Russo-Japanese War were care-
ful to see that these belligerents guaranteed a continuance of
the Open Door policy; this is why it is of importance to us to
know whether this pledge is being kept.
In centering my attention upon Japan in this article let
me say in the outset, I am not to be understood as being one
whit more tolerant of Russian than of Japanese aggression in
Manchuria — I am not. In the Russo-Japanese War my sym-
pathies were all with Japan, my present friendships with num-
bers of her sons I prize very highly, but I cannot blind myself
to the fact that she is apparently "drunk with sight of power"
in the Orient.
As conditions are to-day, the reason for giving primary atten-
tion to Japan's position in Manchuria rather than Russia's
must be self-evident. In the first place, the territory embraced
in her sphere of influence is more important and contains two
thirds the population. Then again: Northern Manchuria
being cold and inhospitable, Japan's sphere not only covers
the fairer and more favored section agriculturally, but from the
standpoint of military strategy (as a mighty war taught all
the world) Japan is vastly better placed. With Port Arthur
in her possession, and the new broad-gauge line from Antung
and Mukden enabling her to rush troops across the Sea of
Japan and through Korea to Manchuria without once getting
into foreign waters or on foreign soil, she could ask nothing
better. And finally and most significant of all, Russia has
LIKE SCENES FROM OUR WESTERN PRAIRIES
Manchuria is a vast empire — one of the most fertile portions of the earth's
surface. The great money crop is the soy bean, and the lower picture shows
miles of beans and bean-cake awaiting shipment at Changchun
MANC'IIIRIAN WOMEN (SHOWING PECULIAR HEAD-DRESS)
(IIIXKSK WASTE-PAPKH COLLEICTI lU
Everything in China is scrupulously saved — except human labor. That is
wasted on a colossal scale through the failure to use improved machinery or
scientific knowledge
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 83
suffered perhaps the greatest humiliation in her history by rea-
son of Manchurian aggression; she has learned Japan's point
of vantage; and whatever advance she makes in the near future
will be only by Japanese sufferance and connivance.
Whatever may be the meaning of the alleged secret treaty
between Japan and Russia, the great truth which all nations
need to remember is this: Whatever scotches Japanese aggres-
sion in Manchuria scotches Russian aggression at the same time
— automatically and simultaneously. To the Open Door in
Manchuria Japan carries the key.
Ill
Japan's primary commercial advantage over all other nations
in South Manchuria, her railway monopoly, together with the
use she is making of this monopoly and her plans to maintain
it, we must now consider more in detail.
When the war with Russia ended, Japan succeeded Russia
in the control of what is now the South Manchurian Railway,
running from Dairen (formerly Dalny) to Chang-chun, 438
miles, through the very heart of the country, and she also ob-
tained from China the right "to maintain and work the military
line constructed between Antung and Mukden and" — as if
of secondary importance — "to improve the said line so as to
make it fit for the conveyance of commercial and industrial
goods of all nations." The stipulation with regard to the South
Manchurian Railway was that China should have the right to
buy it back in 1938, and with regard to the Antung-Mukden
line, in 1932, by paying the total cost — "all capital and all
moneys owed on account of the line and interest." And just
here Japan is playing a wily game.
Consider, for example, the Antung-Mukden line just re-
ferred to, now regarded as a part of the South Manchurian
system. Although running through a very mountainous and
sparsely settled area, it is of immense importance to Japan
84 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
from a strategic standpoint, connecting Mukden as it does
with the Japanese railway in Korea leading directly to Fusan,
and thus enabling Japan to transport troops across her own ter-
ritory to Manchuria without taking any of the risks involved in
getting out of her own waters and boundaries. The paramount
military importance of the line is further indicated by the fact
that no one had thought of a commercial line here at all.
Simply as a matter of war-time necessity Japan stretched a
2|-foot narrow-gauge line across these mountain barrens to
transport her troops in 1905. It is interesting to see, therefore,
how she has now interpreted her right to "work, maintain and
improve" — especially "improve" — this line. In October I
spent two days travelhng over its entire length (188 miles), most
of the time on the narrow-gauge part, and I was amazed to
see on what a magnificent scale the new broad-gauge- substitute
line is now building. In striking contrast to the traditional
Japanese tendency to impermanence in building, this line is
constructed regardless of expense as if to last for a thousand
years. Tunnel after tunnel through solid rock, the most superb
masonry and bridges wherever streams intervene, the best of
ballast to make an enduring roadbed — all these indicate the
style of the new, not "improved" but utterly reconstructed,
line which is building for Japan's benefit at China's expense —
at China's expense directly if she buys it back in 1932, at
China's expense indirectly if she doesn't.
It will be remembered, of course, that according to her
agreement with China, Japan was to begin the work of "im-
proving" the Antung-Mukden line within two years. Whether
she was strangely unable to make any sort of beginning in the
period, or whether she purposely delayed it in order to show her
contempt for Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria, it is dijSScult to
say; what is known is only that the Mikado's government let its
treaty rights lapse, and then when China objected to a renewal,
defied China, and proceeded with the work of "improvement"
by what was euphemistically termed "independent action."
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 85
Incidentally, it may be recalled just here that in the Ports-
mouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia jointly promised the
rest of the world "to exploit their respective railways in Man-
churia exclusively for commercial and industrial purposes and
in no wise for strategic purpose."
That Japan (in the event no other method of getting control
of Manchuria appears) hopes to make the railroads too expen-
sive for the hard-pressed Peking government to buy back is
self-evident. She is looking far ahead, as those interested in the
continuance of the Open Door policy must also look far ahead.
The real Open Door question is not a matter of the last four or
five years or of the next four or five years, but whether after
a comparatively short time the Door is to be permanently
closed as in Korea. If it be said that Japan is only human
in laying many plans to gain so rich an empire, let it also be
said that other nations are only human if they wish to protect
their own interests.
IV
For one thing, as has been suggested, Japan has a perfectly
obvious plan to make the railways too expensive for China to
purchase when the lease expires, and just here some compari-
sons may be in order. In Japan proper the government-
owned railway stations are severe and inexpensive structures
in which not one yen is wasted for display and but little for
convenience. When I was in Tokyo, for example, Ex-Premier
Okuma, in a public interview, called attention to the disrepu-
table condition and appearance of the leading station (Shim-
bashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign tourists
must inevitably have their general impressions of the country
unfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is
its appearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian
Railway, also under the control of the Japanese Government
(five sixths of the investment held by the government and one
86 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
sixth by individual Japanese), one finds an entirely different
policy in force. Handsome stations, built to accommodate
traffic for fifty years to come, have been erected. In Dairen,
"virtually the property of the railway company," the system
has built a magnificent modern city — street railways, water-
works, electric light plants, macadamized roads, and beautiful
public parks. More than this, the railway company, not
content with the best of equipment for every phase of legiti-
mate railway work, including handsome stations and railway
offices, such as Japan proper never sees, has also erected hotels
which, for the Orient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five
leading cities of Manchuria. Comparatively few travellers
go to Mukden, and yet the hotel which the South Manchurian
Railway has erected there, for example, is perhaps not excelled
in point of furnishing and equipment anywhere in the Far East.
In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected
not only to pay for the railways themselves but for all the
irrelevant enterprises — hotels, parks, cities — in which the
railway companies have embarked; for lines "improved"
beyond recognition, and for lines built not even with a view
to ultimate profit, but for their strategic importance to a rival
and possibly antagonist nation ! As an Englishman said to me :
"It's much the same as if I, a poor man, should rent you a
$1000 house, agreeing to stand the expense of some improve-
ments when taking it back, and you should spend $10,000 in
improving my $1000 house — and largely to suit your own
peculiar business and purposes."
More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep
her absolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facili-
ties. In Article IV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and
Russia reciprocally engaged not to "obstruct any general meas-
ures, common to all countries, which China may take for the
development of the commerce and industry of Manchuria,"
but in December of the same year Japan caused China to yield a
secret agreement prohibiting any new line "in the neighbor-
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 87
hood of and parallel to" the South Manchurian Railway
or any branch line that "might be prejudicial" to it. Japan,
under threat of arms, forced China to abandon the plan for
the Hsinmintun-Fakumen line after arrangements had been
made with an English syndicate, and later Japan and Russia
on the same pretext prevented the proposed Chinchow-Aigun
line across Mongolia and Manchuria, although a hundred miles
or more away from the South Manchurian line.
That Japan, then, holds the whip hand in Manchuria, and
expects to continue to hold it, is very clear. With China as
yet too weak to protect herself, Japan is virtually master of
the situation. Let us ask then — since this is in an American
book — whether the Open Door policy is being enforced even
now; to ask it of any one in Manchuria is to be laughed at.
I tried it once in a Standard Oil ofl&ce and the man in front of
me roared, and an unnoticed clerk at my back, overhearing
so absurd a question, was also unable to contain his merri-
ment. It is not a question of the fact of the shutting-up policy,
Chinese and foreigners in Manchuria will tell you; it is only a
question as to the extent of that condition.
The truth is that the ink was hardly dry on the early trea-
ties before the discriminations began. The military railroads,
which Japan was in honor bound to all the world to use
only for war purposes, were used for transporting Japanese
goods before the military restrictions with regard to the admis-
sion of other foreign goods were removed. The Chinese mer-
chant and his patrons were famishing for cotton "piece goods"
and other manufactured products, and the Japanese goods
coming over were quickly taken up and a market for these
particular "chops" or "trademarks" (the Chinaman relies
largely on the chop) was established. By the time European
and American goods came back their market in many cases
88 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
had already been taken away. In some cases, too, their trade-
mark rights had been virtually ruined by the closeness of Japa-
nese imitation. Even on my recent tour, among consuls of three
nations, at Manchurian points, I did not find one who did not
mention some recent case of trademark infringement.
Then came the period of freight discriminations and rebates,
when the Japanese (principally the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, the
one great octopus of Japanese business and commerce) secured
freight rates that practically stifled foreign business competitors.
The railway company now asserts that rebates (formerly
allowed, it alleges, because of heavy shipments) are no longer
given; but in many cases the evil effects of the former rebating
policy remain in that Japanese traders were thus allowed to
rush in during a formative period and establish permanent trade
connections.
Meanwhile, too, the relations between the Japanese Govern-
ment and the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha are so close that competi-
tors are virtually in the plight of having to ship goods over a
line owned by a rival — without any higher tribunal to guar-
antee equality of treatment. As was recently declared:
"Two directors of the South Manchurian Railway are also directors of Mitsui
Bussan Kaisha. The traflBc manager of the railway is an ex-employee of Mit-
sui. The customs force at Dalny is not only entirely Japanese — no other
foreigner in charge of a Chinese customs office employs exclusively assistants
of his own nationality — but a number of the customs inspectors are ex-employ-
ees of Mitsui. The Mitsui company also maintains branches all through
Manchuria in and out of treaty ports. In this way they escape the payment
of Chinese likin, or toll taxes. The Chinese have agreed that these taxes —
2 per cent, on the value of the goods each time they pass to a new inland town
— shall not be paid so long as they remain in the hands of the foreigner. Amer-
ican piece goods often pay likin tax, two, three, or four times, while the Japa-
nese — sometimes legitimately by reason of their branch houses, sometimes
illegally by bluffing Chinese officials or smuggling through their military areas
— manage to escape likin almost altogether." " • -^ '
It may not be true that the Japanese customs officials at
Dairen (the treaty provides that China shall appoint a Japanese
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 89
collector at this port), ignorantly or knowingly, allow Japanese
goods to be smuggled through to Manchuria — although con-
suls of three nations a few months ago thought the matter
serious enough to suggest an investigation — but the evasion
of likin taxes in the interior is an admitted fact.
More flagrant still is another violation of international
treaty rights. Under Chinese regulations foreign merchants
are not allowed to do business in the Manchurian interior away
from the twenty-four open marts, but it has been shown that
several thousand Japanese are now stationed within the pro-
hibited area, and Japan's reply to the Chinese Viceroy's protest
is that he should have objected sooner and that it is now too
late. Meanwhile, many Chinese merchants both in the in-
terior and along the South Manchurian Railway, themselves
paying the regular likin and consumption taxes, are finding
themselves unable to compete with the Japanese, who refuse
to pay these taxes. Thus Japan is gradually rooting out the
natives who stand in her way, and, day by day, tightening her
grip on the country.
She is advancing step by step as she did in Korea.
On the whole, the Mikado's subjects seem already to count
themselves virtual masters of the country. Inside their railway
areas and concessions they have their own government; in the
majority of cases while in Manchuria I found it more convenient
to use the Japanese telegraph or the Japanese postal system
than the Chinese; and where I stopped at the little towns along
the line it was a Japanese oflBcer who came to inquire my name
and nationality. When I was in Mukden the German consul
there had just had two Chinese meddlers arrested for spying
on his movements, only to find that they were acting under
the direction of Japanese oflacials who claimed immunity for
them! The fact that they have their soldiers back of them,
and that they can be tried only in their own courts, also gives
the Japanese unlimited assurance in bullying the natives.
At Mukden the Japanese bellboy struck my Chinese rickshaw
90 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
man to get his attention. At Taolu some weeks ago some Japa-
nese merchants who were there doing business illegally (for it
is not an open mart) were interfered with, with the result that
the Japanese authorities when I was in Mukden were preparing
a formal demand for satisfaction, including indemnity for any
injury to an unlawful business !
Manifestly, the new masters of Manchuria propose to teach
the natives their place. " If a Chinaman is killed by a Japanese
bullet," as a Chinaman of rank said to me in Manchuria, "the
fault is not that of the man who fired the bullet: the Chinaman
is to blame for getting in the way of it!"
VI
Those who apologize for Japanese aggressiveness in Man-
churia, those who excuse or sympathize with her evident pur-
pose to make Manchuria walk the way of Korea, have but one
argument for their position — the pitiably abused and thread-
bare plea that the Japanese have won the country by the
blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answer to
this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty China-
man just mentioned. "The Japanese," said he, "claimed
they were fighting Russia because she was preparing to
rob China of Manchuria; now they themselves out-Russia
Russia. It is much as if I should knock a man down, saying,
'That man was about to take your watch,' and then take the
watch myself!"
The aptness of the simile is evident. My sympathy, and
the sympathy of every other American acquaintance of mine
as far as I can now recall, was with Japan in her struggle be-
cause of our hot indignation over Russian aggressiveness. But
if Japan had said, "I am fighting to put Russia out only that
I may myself develop every identical policy of aggrandize-
ment that she has inaugurated," it is very easy to see with what
different feelings we should have regarded the conflict.
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 91
Moreover, Japan's legitimate fruits of victory do not extend
to the control or possession of Manchuria. As one of the
ablest Englishmen met on my tour in the Far East pointed
out, Japan's purposes in inaugurating the war were four: (1)
to get a preponderating inj3uence in Korea; (2) to get the
control of the Tsushima Straits, which a preponderating influ-
ence in Korea would give her; (3) to drive Russia from her
ever-menacing position at Port Arthur; and (4) to arrest (as
she alleged) the increasing influence and power of Russia in
Manchuria.
All these things she has gained. Furthermore, she now has
actual possession of Korea. The menace of a great Russian
navy has been swept away. Again, she has become (with the
consent of England) the commanding naval power in the eastern
Pacific; and she has gained an influence in South Manchuria
at least equal to that which Russia had previous to the war.
And yet one hears the plea that unless she gets Manchuria
her blood will have been spilt without result! Unless she can
do more in the way of robbing China than she went to war with
Russia for doing, she will not be justified !
Among representatives of five nations with whom I discussed
the matter in Manchuria I found no dissent from the opinion
that Japan will never get out of Manchuria, unless forced to
do so by a speedily awakened China or by the most emphatic
and unmistakable attitude on the part of the Powers. Chinese,
English, Americans, Germans — all nationalities — in Man-
churia agree that thus far the way of Manchuria has been
the way of Korea and that only favoring circumstances — a
rebellion fomented in China or whatever excuse may serve — is
needed for the same end to be reached.
Then with Japanese customs duties to complete the shutting
out of foreign goods, now made only partially possible by the
discrimination of a railway monopoly, and with the entire Chi-
nese Empire and foreign trade rights within it menaced by the
added preeminence of Japan, the people of Europe and America
92 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
may wake up too late to find out at last that the Open Door
in Manchuria is a matter of somewhat more general impor-
tance than the disturbances in Turkey or the change of govern-
ment in Portugal.
Be it said, in conclusion, however, that if the white nations
take heed in time all this may be prevented. China's walking
up may serve the same purpose, but it is doubtful whether
she will develop sufficient military strength for this. In any
case there need be and should be no war, and in describing con-
ditions as I found them my purpose is to help the cause of peace
and not that of bloodshed. For if the Powers realize the seri-
ousness of the situation and give evidence of such feeling to
Japan that she will realize the bounds of safety, there will be
no trouble. But a continued policy of ignorance, indifference,
or inactivity means that Japan will probably go so far that she
cannot retreat without a struggle. Tru.th is in the interest
of peace.
Mukden, Manchuria.
LIGHT FROM CHINA ON PROBLEMS AT HOME
1AM here in China's ancient capital at one of the most in-
teresting periods in all the four thousand years that the
Son of Heaven has ruled the Middle Kingdom. The old
China is dying — fast dying; a new China is coming into
being so rapidly as to amaze even those who were most expec-
tant of rapid change. The dreams of twelve years ago, that
have since seemed nothing but dreams, are coming into actual
realization.
Great reforms were then proposed — twelve years ago —
and the Emperor sanctioned edict after edict for their intro-
duction. But their hour had not yet come.
I talked yesterday with one of the men whose voice was
most potent at that time: a man whose heart was then aflame
with the idea of remaking China. They dared much, did
these men, and Tantsetung, a Chinaman of high rank and a
Christian, consecrated himself on his knees to the great task,
with all the devotion of a Hannibal swearing allegiance to
Carthage. But reaction came. The Emperor was deposed
and the Empress Dowager substituted, and Tantsetung and
five other leaders were beheaded.
Now, however, dying Tantsetung's brave words have already
been fulfilled: "You may put me to death, but a thousand
others wiU rise up to preach the same doctrine." A new reign
has come; the Empress Dowager, dying, has been succeeded
by a mere boy, whose father, the Prince Regent, holds the
imperial sceptre. But the sceptre is no longer all-powerful.
93
94 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
For the first time in all the cycles of Cathay the voice of the
people is stronger than the voice of the Throne. Men do not
hesitate any day to say things for which, ten years ago, they
would have paid the penalty with their heads.
There are many things that give one faith in the future
of China, but nothing else which begets such confidence as
the success of the crusade against the opium habit. Four
years ago, when the news went out that China had resolved
to put an end to the opium habit within ten years — had
started on a ten years' war against opium — there were many
who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quix-
otic even for praise; there were more who regarded it as
praiseworthy but as beiaig as unpromising as a drunkard's
swearing off at New Year's, while those who expected success
to come even in twice ten years hardly dared express their
confidence among well-informed people.
"If there is anything which all our contact with the Chinese
has taught more unquestionably than anything else, it is that
the Chinaman will always be a slave to the opium habit."
So said a professedly authoritative American book on China,
published only five years ago, and to hold any other opinion
was usually regarded as contradictory to common sense. " We
white Americans can't get rid of whiskey intemperance with
all our moral courage and all our civilization and all our Chris-
tianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorant China-
man to shake off the clutches of opium?" So it was said,
but to-day the most tremendous moral achievement of recent
history — China's victory over opium-intemperance already
assured and in great measure completed, not in ten years, but
in four — stands out as a stinging rebuke to the slow progress
our own people have made in their warfare against drink-
intemperance.
To shake off the opium habit when once it has gripped a
man is no easy task. Officials right here in Peking, for
example, died as a result of stopping too suddenly after the
LIGHT FROM CHINA 95
edict came out announcing that no opium victim could remain
in the public service. But a member of the Emperor's cabi-
net, or Grand Council, tells me that 95 per cent, of the
public officials who were formerly opium-smokers have given
up the habit, or have been dismissed from office. Five
per cent, may smoke in secret, but with the constant menace
of dismissal hanging like a Damocles sword over their heads,
it may be assumed that even these few are breaking them-
selves from the use of the drug.
Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to
his guests, but the Chinese have now quite a changed public
sentiment. Because they recognize that opium is ruining the
lives of many of their people, and lessening the efficiency of
many others, because they regard it as a source of weakness to
their country and danger to their sons, it has become a matter
of shame for a man to be known as an opium-smoker, even
"in moderation." To be free from such an enervating dis-
sipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's
family, but to the country as well : it is a patriotic duty. I saw
a cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which
there were held up to especial scorn and humiliation the weak-
ling officials who had lost their offices by reason of failure to
shake off opium. In short, the opium-smoker, instead of being
a sort of "good fellow with human weaknessess" — and with
possibilities, of course, of going utterly to wreck — has become
an object of contempt, a bad citizen.
The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated
in the great financial sacrifices made by farmers and land-
owners in sections where the opium poppy was formerly grown.
The culture of the poppy in some sections was far more prof-
itable than that of any other crop; it was, in fact, the "money
crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growing the opium poppy
has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, in the profit
and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of
old land values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had
9G WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
been home-owners became homeless. And yet China has
thought no price too great to pay in the effort to free herself
from this form of intemperance. Well may her leading men
proudly declare, as one did to me to-day: "While America
dares not undertake the task of stopping the whiskey curse
among less than a hundred million people, we are stopping the
opium curse among over four hundred millions." It should
also be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At
a dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth
while to mention as a matter of general interest to her guests
(so rare is the occurrence) that she had seen a drunken China-
man that day. I have not yet seen one.
China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into
industrial competition with all the world, and I am glad that
she is. I believe that every strong and worthy . nation is
enriched by the proper development of every other nation.
But in this coming struggle the people whom vice or dissipation
has rendered weak sooner or later must go down before the
men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious habit, keep
th^ir bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder tones
indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America.
If we are to maintain our high place among the nations of the
earth, if we are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry,
we can do it only by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the
yellow man of the Orient is doing in this respect, from every
enervating influence that now weakens the physical stamina,
blunts the moral sense, or befogs the brain.
The new China is devoting itself to a number of other
reforms to which the people of America may well give atten-
tion. The curse of graft among her public officials ("squeeze"
it is called over here) is one of the most deep-rooted cancers
with which she has to contend. Officers have been paid small
salaries and have been allowed to make up for the meagre-
ness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees and tips.
Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will
LIGHT FROM CHINA 97
doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and ** squeeze"
system, stop grafting, and put all the more important offices
on a strict salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying
county and city officials in the United States, as my readers
know, we have often let enormous sums go into office-holders'
pockets when they should have gone into improving our roads
and schools. The Chinese system not only has this weakness,
but by reason of the fact that the fees are not regularly fixed
by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for number-
less other abuses.
Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in
importance to the abolition of "squeeze." There is no na-
tional currency here; each province (or state, as we would
say) issues its own money when it pleases, just as the different
American states did two generations ago. I remember hear-
ing" an old man tell of going from the Carolinas to Alabama
about 1840 and having to pay heavy exchange to get his Car-
olina money changed into Alabama money. So it is in China
to-day. You must get your bills of one bank or province
changed whenever you go into another bank or province,
paying an outrageous discount, and a banking corporation
will even discount a bill issued by another branch of the
same corporation. Thus a friend of mine with a five-dollar
Russia-Asiatic banknote from the Peking branch on taking
it to the Russia-Asiatic's branch at Hankow gets only $4.80
for it.
Nor is this all: All kinds of money are in circulation, the
values constantly fluctuating, and hundreds and thousands
of men make a living by "changing money," getting a per-
centage on each transfer. Take the so-called 20-cent pieces
in circulation; they lack a little of weighing one fifth as much
as the 100-cent dollar; consequently it takes sometimes 110
and again 112 cents "small coin" to equal one dollar! The
whole system is absurd, of course, and yet when the govern-
ment proposes to establish a uniform national currency it is
98 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
said that the influence of these money-changers is so great
as to make any reform exceedingly slow and difficult.
And yet let not my readers at home with this statement be-
fore them proceed too hastily to laugh or sneer at China for
unprogressiveness. For my part, as I have thought of this
matter of money transfer over here, the whole question has
seemed to me to be on all-fours with our question of land title
transfers at home, and the more I have thought of it the firmer
has the conviction become. In fact, China's failure to adopt
a modern currency system is perhaps even less a sinning against
light than our failure to adopt the Torrens system of register-
ing land titles. The man who makes a living by changing
money and investigating its value is no more a parasite than
the man who makes a living changing titles or investigating
their value; the hindrance of trade and easy transfer of prop-
erty is no more excusable in one case than the other; and the
90 per cent, that China might save by a better system of
money transfers is paralleled by the 90 per cent, that we might
save by a better system of title transfers.
Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the
expense of the people, prevents currency reform in China — •
yes, that is true. But before we assume superior airs let us
see if Mr. Title-Changing Lawyer, also fattening needlessly
at the expense of the people, does not go to our next legis-
lature and stifle any measure for reforming land-title registra-
tion. And in saying this I am not to be understood as making
any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or
our American lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens
system I know are lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought
to be content with the really useful ways of earning money
and not insist on keeping up utterly useless and indefensible
means of getting fees out of the people. Such lawyers, indeed,
deserve honor; my criticism is aimed only at those who realize
the wisdom of a changed system but are led by selfishness
to oppose it.
LIGHT FROM CHINA 99
After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic
reform in the new China is the changed policy of the schools.
For thousands of years the education has been exclusively
literary. The aim has been to produce scholars. A thorough
knowledge of the works of the sages and poets, and the ability
to write learned essays or beautiful verses, this has been the
test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book on China
five years ago he could say:
" The Chinese scholar knows nothing of ancient or modern history (outside
of China), geography, astronomy, zoology or physics. He knows perfectly well
the dynastic history of his own coimtry and he composes beautiful poems, and
these are his only accomplishments."
But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting
public officials by examination as to classical scholarship was
abolished the year after Colonel Denby's book was published,
and the new ideal of the school is to train men and women for
useful living, for practical things, and to combine culture with
utility. Japanese education now has the same aim. There,
in fact, even the study of the languages is made to subserve
a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latin and
soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and con-
tinues to read English and speak it on occasion the rest of his
life, increasing his efficiency and usefulness in no small measure
as a result. In Japan, too, I found the keenest interest in
the teaching of agriculture to boys and domestic science to
girls; and in all these things China is also moving — blunder-
ingly, perhaps, but yet making progress — toward the most
modern educational ideas.
As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last
ten years of making the schools train for more useful living,
China and Japan have actually moved relatively much farther
away from old standards than we have done, and if they
should continue the same rate of advance for the next thirty
years we may find their schools doing more for the efficiency
100 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
of the people than our American schools are doing. And when
I say this let not the cry go up that I am decrying culture.
Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to old
standards of education with even more tenacity than absurdly
conservative China has done. I am not decrying culture,
but I am among those who insist that culture may come from
a study of useful things as well as from a study of useless things;
that a knowledge of the chemistry of foods may develop a
girl's mind as much as a knowledge of chemistry that is with-
out practical use; and that a boy may get about as much cul-
tural value from the knowledge of a language which does put
him into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a
language which might put him into touch with ancient life
but which he will probably forget as soon as he gets his diploma.
Slow-moving and tradition-cursed China and Japan, as v/e
thought them a generation ago, have already committed
themselves to making education train for actual life. Has
America given anything more than a half-hearted assent to
the idea?
The practical value of this article, I am reminded ]ust here,
has to do almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to
remind your member of the legislature of the parallel be-
tween the wasteful and antiquated money-transfer system
in China and the equally wasteful and antiquated title-transfer
system at home; you may wish to inform your member of the
legislature and your school officials of the advance of practical
education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind both
your member of the legislature and your congressman of
China's successful crusade against the opium evil as an incen-
tive for more determined American effort against the drink
evil. Let me conclude this letter, therefore, with two more
facts with which you may prod your representatives in Wash-
ington. (Which reminds me to remark, parenthetically, that
every reform the Chinese are getting to-day comes as a result
of persistently bringing pressure on their officials; and this
LIGHT FROM CHINA 101
parenthetical observation may be as full of suggestion as any
idea I have elaborated at greater length.)
The two facts with which you may stir up your servants
in Washington are just these:
First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the
other day I mailed a package by parcels post to another coun-
try for about half what it would have cost me to mail it from
one county-seat to another at home. How long are we going
to be content to let so-called "heathen" countries like China
have advantages which so-called enlightened, progressive
America is too slow to adopt?
Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this
article one of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells
me that the average tariff -protected American industry sells
goods to Asiatic buyers at 30 per cent, less than it will sell to
the people at home. Thirty per cent., he says, is the usual
discount for Oriental trade. An electric dynamo which is
sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for Chinese trade
at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip have
men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over
here, after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we
Americans can buy them at our own doors. For example,
a man told me a few weeks ago of buying fleece-lined under-
wear at half what it costs at home; a missionary tells me that
he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of Royal baking
powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats
are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting
machinery made in Chicago is carried across land and sea, half-
way around the world, and sold in far-away Siberia for less
than the American farmer can buy it at the factory gates.
And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others
might be given.' How long the American people are going
to find it amusing to be held up in such fashion remains to
be seen.
Peking, China.
XI
THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK
WITHIN eighteen months China will have a parlia-
ment or a revolution (she may have both). Such
at least is the prediction I am wilhng to risk, and
it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking
would indorse.
And the coming of a parliament, popular goverment, to
guide the destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of
Heaven has reigned supreme for more than four thousamd
years — this is only one chapter in the whole marvelous story,
not of China Awakening, but of China Awake. For the
breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which
but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of
history. "China Breaking Up" was the keynote of every-
thing written about the Middle Kingdom ten years ago;
"China Waking Up" has been the keynote of everything treat-
ing of itj these last five years.
Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exagger-
ate when he declares that in a European sense China has made
greater progress these last ten years than in the preceeding ten
centuries. The criticism one hears most often now is, not that
the popular leaders are too conservative, but that they are if,
anything, too radical; are moving, not too slowly, but too
rapidly.
Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn
what the West has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain
that a little contact with Europe and America gives a leader
102
THE NEW CHINA 108
undue influence. "Let an official take a trip abroad and for
six montlis after his return he is the most respected authority
in the empire." Instead of English missionaries worrying
over China's slavery to the opium habit, we now have Eng-
lish officials -embarrassed because China's too rapid breaking
loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues.
Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the
part of the provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others
to aid Manchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the begin-
nings of an intense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence.
Even Confucius no longer looks backward. A young friend
of mine who is a descendant of the Sage (of the seventy-fifth
generation) speaks English fluently and is getting a thoroughly
modern education, while Duke Kung, who inherits the title
in the Confucian line, is patron of a government school which
gives especial attention to English and other modern branches
— by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that the ancient
examination halls in Peking to which students have come from
all parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars
among them rewarded with the highest offices, have now been
torn down, and where these buildings once stood Chinese
masons and carpenters are fashioning the building that is to
house China's first national parliament — unless the parlia-
ment comes before this building can be made ready.
And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake
up in a part of his body only, he wakes up all over. So it
seems with Cathay. The more serious problem now is not to
get her moving, but to keep her from moving too rapidly.
In his Civic Forum address in New York three years ago, Wu
Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes
up, she will move like an avalanche." A movement with the
power of an avalanche needs very careful guidance.
The one question about which every Chinese reformer's
heart is now aflame is that of an early parliament. By the
imperial decree of 1908 a parliament and a constitution were
104 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
promised within nine years. At that time there was little
demand for a parliament, but with the organization of the
Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 the people were given
an opportunity to confer together and were also given a taste
of power. For the first time, too, they seem to have realized
suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact that since
the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and
the dismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting
for the infant Emperor, the Peking government is without a
strong leader. Consequently the demand for a hastened parlia-
ment has grown too powerful to be resisted. True, when the
delegates from all the Provincial Assemblies voiced this demand
to the Prince Regent last spring his reply was the Edict of
May 29, declaring that the programme outlined by their late
Majesties, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, could not
be changed. Furthermore, the Throne remarked significantly:
"Let no more petitions or memorials upon this subject be
presented to Us; Our mind is made up."
Unfortunately for the peace of the Regent, however, John
Chinaman is absurdly and obnoxiously persistent on occasion.
If you will not heed other appeals, he may commit suicide on
your doorstep, and then you are bewitched for the rest of your
days, to say nothing of your nights. The talk of an earlier
parliament would not down even at the bidding of the Dragon
Throne. Quietly unmanageable delegations waited upon vice-
roys and compelled these high officials to petition for a
reopening of the question. Down in Kiang Su a scholar cut
off his left arm and with the red blood wrote his appeal. In
Union Medical Hospital, here in Peking, as I write this, a
group of students are recovering from self-inflicted wounds
made in the same cause. Going to the Prince Regent's, they
were told that the Prince could not see them. "Very well,"
they declared, "we shall sit here till he does." At length the
Prince sent word that, though he could not receive them, he
would consider their petition, and the students then sliced the
PU YI, THE SON OF HEAVEN AND EMPEROR OF THE MIDDLE
KINGDOM
The baby sovereign of one of the vastest and oldest of empires is shown here in
the lap of his father, Prince Chun, the Regent
HOW CHINA IS DEALING WITH OPIUM-INTEMPERANCE
Burning a pile of pipes of reformed smokers at Hankow. The amazing
success of Chinas crusade to free her people from the opium curse may be
justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in history — a chal-
lenge to our Western world
THE NEW CHINA 107
living flesh from their arms and thighs as evidence of their
earnestness, coloring their petition with their blood.
At this period of our drama there came upon the stage a
new actor, at first little heeded, but quickly becoming the
dominating figure — the Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assem-
bly. This body, consisting of 100 nobles and men of wealth
or scholarship appointed by the Throne, and 100 selected
members of Provincial Assemblies approved by the viceroys,
was expected to prove a mere echo of the royal wishes. "It
is evident that the government is to have a docile and sub-
missive assembly. Mediocrity is the chief characteristic of
the members chosen." So wrote one of the best informed
Americans in China, some weeks before it assembled, October 3.
Renter's press agent in Peking predicted through his papers
that a few pious resolutions would represent the sum total of
the Assembly's labors.
And yet the first day that these two gentlemen went with me
to look in on the Assembly we found it coolly demanding that
the Grand Council, or imperial cabinet, be summoned before
it to explain an alleged breach of the rights of Provincial As-
semblies !
From the very beginning the course of this National Assem-
bly in steadily gathering unexpected power to itself has re-
minded me of the old States-General in France in the days
just before the Revolution, and I could not help looking for
Danton and Robespierre among the fiery orators in gown and
queue on this occasion. Significantly, too, I now hear on the
authority of an eminent scholar that Carlyle's great master-
piece is the most popular work of historical literature ever
translated into Chinese. May it teach them some lessons of
restraint as well as of aggressiveness!
Be that as it may, the Assembly has proved untamable in
its demands for an early parliament, not even the hundred
government members standing up against the imperious pres-
sure of public opinion. In late October the Assembly unani-
108 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
raously petitioned the Throne to hasten the programme of
constitutional government. The day this petition was pre-
sented it was currently rumored in Peking that unless the
Prince Regent should yield the people would refuse to pay
taxes. But he yielded. The trouble now is that he did not
yield enough to satisfy the public, and there is every indication
that he will have to yield again, in spite of the alleged unalter-
ableness of the present plan, which allows a parliament in
1913 instead of in 1916, as originally promised. A parli-
ament within eighteen months seems a safe prediction as I
write this.
It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parlia-
ment will be wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practi-
cally established the rule of the people centuries before any
European nation adopted the idea. Nominally, the local
magistrate has had almost arbitrary power, but practically
the control has been in the hands of the village elders. When
they have met and decided on a policy, the magistrate has not
dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, gov-
ernors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and
kept in check. Thus centuries of practical seK-government in
local affairs have given the Chinese excellent preparation for
the new departure in national affairs. What is proposed is
not a new power for the people but only an enlargement or
extension of powers they already exercise.
Parliamentary government is the one great accomplish-
ment the Chinese people are now interested in, because they
propose to make it the tool with which to work out the other
Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that
they may set about these tasks inspired by the self-confidence
begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements of modern
times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success of
their anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed.
Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to
many provinces, finding in all the same surprising success in
THE NEW CHINA 109
enforcing anti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle
of the Middle Kingdom and a lesson for the world."
China's next great task is the education of her people, and
the remedy for pessimism here is to compare her present con-
dition, not with that of other nations, but with her own con-
dition ten years ago. A reported school attendance of less
than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a population of
400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we compare
these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years ago
there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metro-
politan province of Chihli, for example, I find that there
are now more teachers in government schools than there were
pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from
8000 to 214,637!
Even if China had not established a single additional school,
however, or increased the school attendance by even a per-
centage fraction, her educational progress these last ten years
would yet be monumental. For as different as the East is
from the West, so different, in literal fact, are her educational
ideals at the present time as compared with her educational
ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of 1905)
the old exclusively classical and literary system of education
was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions
of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting
the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and
bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary
stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement
would have been hopelessly balked.
The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of
history or geography outside of China, nothing of mathematics
in its higher branches. Its main object was to enable the
scholar to write a learned essay or a faultless poem, its main
use to enable him by these means to get office. Under the old
system the Chinese boy learned a thousand characters before
he learned their meaning; after this he took up a book con-
no WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
taining a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the "Tri-
metrical Classics," consisting of proverbs and historical state-
ments with each sentence in three characters. Now he is
taught in much the same way as the Western boy. The old
training developed the powers of memory; the new training
the powers of reasoning. The old education enabled the pupil
to frame exquisite sentences; the new gives him a working
knowledge of the world. The old looked inward to China and
backward to her past; the new looks outward to other countries
and forward to China's future. The old was meant to develop
a few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citi-
zens. "Even our students who go abroad," as a Peking official
said to me, "illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they
preferred to study law or politics; now they take up engineer-
ing or mining."
A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would
not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under
which her people labor and must always labor so long as the
language remains as it is to-day — without an alphabet —
separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and
every word in the language. This means an absolute waste
of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far
as memorizing the characters counts as memory- training, and
five years make up the bulk of the average student's school
days in any country. If it were not for this handicap and the
serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for present needs,
it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advance
of the next twenty years.
The school and the teacher have always been held in the'
highest esteem in China. Her only aristocracy has been an
aristocracy, not of wealth, but of scholarship; her romance has
been, not that of the poor boy who became rich, but of the poor
boy who found a way to get an education and became distin-
guished in public service. Under the old system, if the son
of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the
THE NEW CHINA 111
village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of
unusual promise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beauti-
ful to see, would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advance-
ment. He would be put into long robes and allowed to give
himself up wholly to learning, while parents, brothers, and
sisters found inspiration for their own harder labors in the
thought of the bright future that awaited him. The difficulty
is that education has been regarded as the privilege of a gifted
few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship has
been held in such high favor, however, once let the school
doors open to everybody and there is little doubt that China
will eventually acquire the strength more essential than armies
or battleships: the power which only an educated common
people can give.
China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army.
"Might is right" is the English proverb that I have found more
often on the tongues of the new school of Chinese than any
other; and we must confess that other nations seem to have
tried hard enough to make her accept the principle. In the old
days there was a saying, " Better have no son than one who is a
soldier." To-day its new foreign-drilled army of 150,000 to
200,000 men is the boast of the Middle Kingdom, and the
army is said to be the most honestly administered department
of the government. In sharp contrast to the old contempt
for the soldier, I now find one of the ablest journals in the
empire (the Shanghai National Review) protesting that interest
in military training is now becoming too intense: "Scarce a
school of any pretensions but has its military drill, extending
in some instances as far as equipment with modern rifles and
regular range practice, and we regret to notice that some of
the mission schools have so far forgotten themselves as to
pander to this militarist spirit."
It has often been said, of course, that the Chinese will not
make good soldiers, but whether this has been proved is open
to question. Certainly, in view of their wretchedly inferior
112 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
equipment, their failure to distinguish themselves in the war
with Japan cannot be regarded as conclusive. Take, for ex-
ample, this description by an eye-witness:
"Every tenth man [among the Chinese soldiers] had a great silk banner, but
few were armed with modem weapons. Those who had rifles and modem
weapons at all had them of all makes; so cartridges of twenty different sorts
and sizes were huddled together without any attempt at classification, and in
one open space all sorts were heaped on the ground, and the soldiers were fit-
ting them to their arms, sometimes trying eight or ten before finding one to fit
the weapon, throwing the rejected ones back into the heap."
No sort of efficiency on the part of the rank and file could
have atoned for such criminal indifiPerence to equipment on
the part of the officers. It seems to be the opinion of the mili-
tary authorities with whom I have talked that the Chinese
army is now better manned than officered. *' Wherever there
has been a breach of discipline, I have found it the officers'
fault," an American soldier told me.
The annexation of Korea, once China's vassal, by Japan,
and that country's steadily tightening grip on Manchuria
have doubtless quickened China's desire for military strength.
Moreover, she wishes to grow strong enough to denounce the
treaties by which opium is even now forced upon her against
her will, and by which she is forced to keep her tariff duty on
foreign goods averaging 5 per cent., alike on luxuries and
necessities.
The fifth among China's Herculean labors is the cleansing
of her Augean stables, and by this I can mean nothing else
than the abolition of the system of "squeeze," or graft, on
the part of her officials. In fact, no other reform can be com-
plete until this is accomplished. The bulk of every officer's
receipts comes not from his salary, which is as a rule absurdly
small, but from "squeezes" — fees which every man who has
dealings with him must pay. In most cases, of course, these
fees have been determined in a general way by long usage, but
their acceptance opens the way for innumerable abuses. High
THE NEW CHINA 113
offices are auctioned oflf. When I was in Manchuria it was
currently reported that the Governor of Kirin had paid one
hundred thousand taels for his office. When I was in New-
chwang the Viceroy of Manchuria had Just enriched himself
to the extent of several thousand taels by a visit to that port.
The men who had had favors from him or had favors to ask
left "presents" of a rather substantial character when they
called. I learn from an excellent authority that when an elec-
tric lighting contract was let for Hankow or its suburbs a
short time ago the officials provided a squeeze for themselves
of 10 per cent., but that the Nanking officials, in arranging for
electric lights there, didn't even seem to care whether the plant
worked at all or not: they were anxious only to make a contract
which would net them 35 per cent, of the gross amount! Under
such circumstances it is not surprising to learn that many an
office involving the handling of government revenues has its
price as definitely known as the price of stocks or bonds.
In private business the Chinese have a reputation for honesty
which almost any other nation might envy. With their quick-
ened spirit of patriotism they will doubtless see to it that their
public business is relieved of the shameless disgrace that the
" squeeze system " now attaches to it.
These are some of the big new tasks to which awakened
China is addressing herself. Of course, the continued develop-
ment of her railways is no less important than any other matter
I have mentioned, but railway building cannot be regarded
as one of China's really new tasks. For years she has been
alive to the importance of uniting the people of the different
provinces by means of more railways, more telegraph lines, and
better postal service. The increase in number of pieces of
mail handled from 20,000,000 pieces in 1902 to 306,000,000 in
the last fiscal year bears eloquent testimony alike to the prog-
ress of the post office and to the growing intelligence of the
people. By telegraph the people of remotest Cathay now
make their wishes known to the Son of Heaven and the Tzu-
114 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
cheng Yuan; it was by telephone that this Tzucheng Yuan,
or National Assembly, requested the Grand Council of the
Dragon Empire to appear before it on the day of my first visit.
The slow and stately camel caravans still come down from
Mongolia to Peking — I have seen them wind their serpentine
length through the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they
have been doing for centuries past — but no longer do they
bring the latest news from the tribes about Desert Gobi.
Across 3500 miles of its barren wastes an undaunted tele-
graph line now "hums the songs of the glad parts of the earth."
It is no longer worth while to speculate upon the probability
of a new China; the question now is as to how the new China
is going to affect the United States and the rest of the world.
From our Pacific Coast, China is our next-door neighbor, and
vastly nearer in fact than any map has ever indicated. Even
New York City is now nearer to Shanghai and Hong Kong, in
point of ease of access, than she was to Chicago a century ago.
How Japan's awakening has increased that country's foreign
trade all the world knows — and China has eight times the
population of Japan proper, and twenty-eight times the area,
with almost fabulously valuable natural resources as yet
untouched! Some one has said that to raise the Chinese
standard of living to that of our own people would be (from
the standpoint of markets) equivalent to the creation of four
Americas. The importance of bringing about closer com-
mercial relations between the United States and the Middle
Kingdom can hardly be overestimated.
It is to be hoped, however, that in our desire to cultivate
China's friendship we shall not go to the length of changing
our policy of excluding Asiatic immigration. To the thought-
ful student it must be plain that in the end such a change
would lead only to disastrous reaction. At the same time
we might well effect a change in our methods of enforcing that
policy. There is nothing else on land or sea that the Celes-
tial so much dreads as to "lose face," to be humiliated, and it
THE NEW CHINA llo
is the humiliation that attaches to the exclusion policy rather
than the policy itself that is the great stumbling-block in
the way of thorough cordial relations with America. You
wouldn't so much object to having the servant at the door
report his master not at home to visitors, but you would object
to having the door slammed in your face; and John Chinaman
is just about as human as the rest of us. Moreover, our own
friendliness for John should lead us to adopt the more courteous
of these two methods. Why should not our next exclusion
law, therefore, be based upon the idea of reciprocity, and
provide that there shall be admitted into America any year
only so many Chinese laborers as there were American laborers
admitted into China the preceding year?
Finally, it must always be remembered that the awakening
of China is a matter far more profound than any statistics of
exports or imports or railway lines or industrial development.
The Dragon Empire cannot become (as she will) one of the
mightiest Powers of the earth, her four hundred million people
cannot be brought (as they will be brought) into the full cur-
rent of the world's activities, without profoundly influencing
all future civilization. For its own sake Christendom should
seize quickly the opportunity offered by the present period
of flux and change to help mold the new force that it must
henceforth forever reckon with. "The remedy for the yellow
peril, whatever that may be," as Mr. Roosevelt said while
President, "is not the repression of life, but the cultivation
and direction of life." The school, the mission, the news-
paper— these are the agencies that should be used. Japan
has thousands of teachers in China and scores of newspapers,
but no other nation is adequately active. The present kindly
feeling for America guarantees an especially cordial recep-
tion for American teachers, ministers, and writers, and those
who feel the call to lands other than their own cannot find
a more promising field than China.
Peking, China.
XII
A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA
CAN'T get over (and I hope I never shall) my boyish
interest in the great strange animals that walk along
behind the steam piano in the circus parades. And the
animals that I like to see most, I believe, are the elephants
and the camels. The elephant has about him such quiet, titanic,
unboasting strength, such ponderous and sleepy-eyed. majesty,
as to excite my admiration, but the camel has almost an
equal place in my interest and esteem.
He is a funny -looking beast, is the camel, and he always re-
minds me of Henry Gates' story of the very little boy who
started making a mud man in the spring branch, but before he
got the second arm on, a storm came up, and when he came
back his man had mysteriously disappeared. But when Johnny
went to town next day and for the first time in his life saw a
one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up,
he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?'*
Somehow the camel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks
to me as if he got away before he was finished. He is either a
preliminary rough sketch accidentally turned loose on the
world, or else he got warped somehow in the drying process —
great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene, goose-necked, saddle-
backed Old Slow and Steady!
Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my
entire tour has given me more pleasure than the sight of the
camel trains about Peking and all the way to the end of the
Nankou Pass in the mountains north of the ancient Chinese
116
A MAN-MADE DESERT
PUMPING WATER FOR IRRIGATION
The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast areas
that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing Chinese pumping
water by human treadmill, furnishes another illustration of the Orient's waste
of labor
TRANSPORTATION AND
TRAVEL IN CHINA ^
The camels that come
down from Mongolia and
wind their unhurried way
from Chien Men Gate to the
Gate of the Heavenly Peace
form one of the most pic-
turesque of the many
picturesque sights in fasci-
nating old Peking. The
right-hand picture shows the
author utilizing the most
r ipid means of transit in the
mountains north of Peking
A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA 119
capital. At the Pass this morniag I saw three such camel
trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert of Gobi:
long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as
if I had become a character in the Arabian Nights or a con-
temporary of Kublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest
I have yet seen — twenty -five or thirty camels, I should say,
treading Indian-file with their usual unostentatious stateliness,
a wooden pin through each camel's nostrils from which a cord
bound him to the camel next ahead, a few strangely dressed
drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession.
Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered
by my party, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself,
as we rode our little donkeys mile after mile of rocky way from
Nankou village through the Pass. To begin with, we were
ourselves funny-looking enough, for my donkey was so small
that he could almost walk under the belly of my saddle-horse at
home, and my feet almost touched the ground. The donkeys
ridden by my friends were but little larger, and altogether we
looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules — an
effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey
dropped him twice in the mud! It was our clothing, however,
our ordinary American and European trousers, coats, overcoats
and hats, and the fact that we wore no queues down our backs,
that made us objects of curiosity to the Mongolian and Man-
churian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders, and mule-pack
drivers whom we met on the way, just as we were interested in
the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc., which we found
them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments.
These cotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily
padded bed-quilts ineptly called "comforts," and as the poor
Chinese in the colder sections of the empire cannot afford
much fire in winter, they add one layer of cotton padding after
another until it is difficult for them to waddle along.
On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey-
ride over the rough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their
120 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
very simplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we mee^
come from away up in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet
gone, and the camels and the donkeys (the donkeys in most
cases larger than those we rode) bring down on their backs the
Mongolian products — wool, hides, grain, etc. — and carry
back coal, clothing, and the other simple supplies demanded
by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack
trains of donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose,
each carrying a heavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps
big, well-packed baskets or goods-boxes carefully balanced. A
horse over here will tote about as much as a horse at home would
pull. Then there were several immense droves of sheep:
in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, and every
sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the general
effect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The
Chinese raise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too,
and drive them to market loose in the same way that they
drive their sheep. We also met two or three droves of mountain
horses, a hundred or more to the drove.
But it would have been well worth while to make the trip
if we had gotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great
Wall at the end of the journey. About two thousand miles
of stone and brick, twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough
on top for two carriages to drive abreast, this great structure,
begun two thousand years ago to keep the wild barbarian
Northern tribes out of China, is truly "the largest building on
earth," and one of the world's greatest wonders. It would
be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but where
we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after
another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy,
stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and
thousands of tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the
sheer steep mountainsides is a question that must excite
every traveller's wonder. Certainly no one who has walked
on top of the great wall, climbing among the clouds from one
A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA 121
misty eminence to another, as we did to-day, can ever forget
the experience.
Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not
clear. The mists that hung about the mountain-peaks below
and around us; the roaring wind that shepherded the clouds,
now driving them swiftly before it and leaving in clear view
for a minute peak after peak and valley after valley, the next
minute brushing great fog-masses over wall and landscape
and concealing all from view — all this lent an element of mys-
tery and majesty to the experience not out of keeping with our
thought of the long centuries through which this strange guard
has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long
dead and crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era be-
gan, were the hands that fashioned these earlier brick and laid
them in the mortar, and for many generations thereafter watch-
men armed with bows and arrows rode along the battlements
and towers, straining their eyes for sight of whatever enemy
might be bold enough to try to cross the mighty barrier.
However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we
cannot but admire the almost matchless daring of the concep-
tion and the almost unparalleled industry of the execution.
Beside it the digging of our Panama Canal with modern ma-
chinery, engines, steam power and electricity, considered simply
as a feat of Herculean labor, is no longer a subject for boasting.
To my mind, the very fact that the Chinese people had the
courage to conceive and attempt so colossal an enterprise is
proof enough of genuine greatness. No feeble folk could even
have planned such an undertaking.
On this trip into the heart of China, however, I have noticed
a number of things of decidedly practical value in addition
to the merely curious things I have just reported. In the first
place, I have been simply amazed to find that these Chinese
farmers around Peking, Nankou, and Tien-tsin are far ahead
of some of our farmers in the matter of horsepower help in
plowing.
122 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Coming up from Peking to Nankou, I found farmers in al-
most every field busy with their fall plowing or late grain sowing,
and while there were dozens and dozens of three-horsepower
plows, I saw only one or two one-horsepower plows on the
whole trip. This is all the more surprising in view of the fact
that labor is so cheap over here — 15 cents a day American
money would be a good wage for farm hands — but evidently
the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, they
must have two or three horses in order to get the best results
from the soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in
good condition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys
(they use large donkeys for plowing, even if small ones for
riding) they get the land in good condition in spite of the fact
that they cannot get the good plows that any American farmer
may buy. I rode donkey -back through some farming country
yesterday and watched the work rather closely. The plows,
like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are much better
in workmanship. Here they are made by the village carpen-
ter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, and
below it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point.
The Chinese farmers, it should also be observed in passing,
fully realize the importance of land rolling and harrowing.
It is no uncommon sight to see a man driving a three-horse
harrow. It is also said that for hundreds of years the Chinese
have practised a suitable rotation of crops and have known the
value of leguminous plants.
Nankou Pass, China.
XIII
FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG
SHALL have to go back to Peking some time. You must
hurry out of the city, men tell you there, or else ere you
know it the siren-like Lure of the East will grip you
irresistibly; and I felt in some measure the soundness of
the counsel. The knowledge that each day the long trains of
awkward-moving camels are winding their unhurried way from
Chien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow-
tiled roofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them,
while to the left are the faint gray -blue outlines of the Western
Hills — all this will be to me a silent but perpetual invitation
to go back.
The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never-
failing interest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese
men in gowns and queues (the wives wear the trousers over
here!), the nobles and officers in gorgeous silks and velvets;
the fantastic head-dress of the Manchu ladies, and the hobbling
movements of the Chinese women hampered by ruined feet;
the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring, pig-taUed coolies
in the shafts; the heavy two- wheeled Peking carts like half-
sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreign or
native woman glimpsed through the glass windows of her sedan
chair, eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human
burden; the long lines of shop fronts with such a pleasing
variety of decorative color as to make one wonder why artists
have not made them famous; the uniformed soldiers from
every nation on the earth to guard the various legations, and
123
124 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreign clothing. The
strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memory ever
after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, the jing-
ling bells of the thousands of sturdy little saddle donkeys, the
rattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging
gong of a mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and
behind to bear testimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of
peddlers of many kinds, their wares balanced in baskets borne
from their shoulders.
Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some
man has died and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper-
covered horse in the belief that it will be changed into a real
horse to serve him in the Beyond; and imitations of other
things that might be useful to him are burned in the same way.
Or perhaps a marriage procession may pass. A dozen servants
carry placards with emblems of the rank of the family repre-
sented by the bride or groom, numerous other servants bear
presents, and the bride herself passes by concealed in a gor-
geous sedan chair borne on the shoulders of six or eight coolies.
Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however,
Peking is even richer in historic interest. And by historic in
China is not meant any matter of the last half -hour, such as
Columbus's discovery of America or the landing at Plymouth
Rock; these things to the Chinaman are so modern as to belong
rather in the category of recent daily newspaper sensations
along with the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy or the Thaw
trial. If he wishes something genuinely historic, he goes
back three or four thousand years. For example, a friend of
mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time
ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country.
Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom.
"Yes," he answered, "that is our custom now, since we changed.
But it has not always been so. We did the other way up to
four or five centuries before Christ." Whereupon the audience,
amaze4 at the utterly casual mention of an event two thousand
FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 125
years old as if it were a happening of yesterday, was convulsed
in merriment, which the young Chinaman was entirely unable
to understand.
When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then
bearing another name), having centuries before grown into
eminence, had been destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering
upon its second youth. About the time of the last Caesars it
fell into the hands of the Tartars, who gave place to the Mongols
after 1215. It was during the reign of the Mongol Emperor,
Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital, then called
Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered
America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nan-
kou, built the great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to
this day — forty feet high, wide enough on top for four or
five carriages to drive abreast, and thirteen miles around.
Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have
most often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only
ten years and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak.
The widely current idea is that this Boxer movement originated
in anti-missionary sentiment, but this is not borne out by the
facts. The late Col. Charles Denby, long American Minister
to China, pointed out very clearly that the main cause was
opposition to the land-grabbing policies of European nations.
Once started, however, it took the form of opposition to every-
thing foreign — missionaries and non-missionaries alike. I
passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in
company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the
siege that sounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs;
stories of Chinese Christian converts butchered like sheep
by their infuriated fellow countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in
another part of the city, was finally rescued by foreign troops,
the surviving Christians and missionaries were dying of star-
vation; they had become mere wan, half -crazed skeletons,
subsisting on roots and bark.
The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts
126 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of
the church, but of mankind; for what mart of us is not inspired
to worthier things by every high deed of martyrdom which a
fellowman anywhere has suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers
hurled arrow after arrow with letters attached oflPering immu-
nity to the Chinese converts if they would abandon their Chris-
tian leaders, but«not even starvation led one to desert. Colonel
Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000 Chinese
Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them
abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day
of one family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked
out by suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying
their Master, and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese,
"Jesus Is Leading Me." At Taiyan-fu an especially touching
incident occurred : Five or six young girls, just in their teens,
were about to be killed, when a leader intervened, declaring:
"It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and urged them to
recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since that
is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for
their faith with their lives.
I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means
river in Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the
famous Chinese industrial centre, about 600 miles south of
Peking. About Hankow I found farming much more primi-
tive than that around Peking, Nankou, and Tientsin. Instead
of the three and four horse plows I found in North China,
the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox.
The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of
buying a "farm"; he buys a "field." In Kwang-tung there is
a saying that one sixth of an acre "will support one mouth."
As nearly as I can find out, the average wages paid farm labor-
ers is about 10 cents (gold) a day. The average for all kinds
of labor, a member of the Emperor's Grand Council tells me,
is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18 cents gold a day.
In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in
FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 127
China or Japan there are three or four things that must always
be kept in mind. One is that there are no fences between
fields; I haven't seen a wooden or wire farm -fence since I left
America. A high row or ridge separates one field from another,
and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm-
^ houses. The people live in villages, from ten to fifty farmhouses
grouped together, and the laborers go out from their homes to
the fields each morning and return at evening. The same sys-
tem, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as popula-
tion becomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we
shall doubtless attempt to group our farm homes also. Even
now, much more — vastly more — might be done in this re-
spect if our farmers only had the plan in mind in building new
homes. Where three or four farms come near together, why
should not the dwellings be grouped near a common centre.''
It would mean much for convenience and for a better social life.
Another notable difference from our own country is the
absence of wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any
kind. In this part of China the farmhouse is made of mud
bricks, or mud and reeds, or else of a mixture of mud and stone,
and is usually surrounded by a high wall of the same material.
Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are bask-
ing in the joyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights
they may reflect that the Chinaman on this side of the earth
enjoys no such comfort. Enough fire to cook the scanty meals
is all that he can afford. To protect themselves against cold,
as I have already pointed out, the poor put on many thicknesses
of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wear furs and woolens.
When a coolie has donned the maximum quantity of cotton
padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-plated
cruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him.
At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plow-
ing and harrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out
to the Temple of Agriculture, where each spring the Emperor
or Prince Regent comes and plows sixteen rows, the purpose
128 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
being to bear testimony to the high honorableness of agricul-
ture aifd its fundamental importance to the empire. This
happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it is in late fall
that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy now flailing
grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, or grind-
ing it in mills operated by a single donkey.
In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions
— possibly bUlions — of the Chinese dead are even more
in evidence than in the northern provinces. Let China last
a few more thousand years with its present customs and the
country will be one vast cemetery, and the people will have to
move away to find land to cultivate. As not one grave in a
thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem as
if they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that each
Chinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The
care of their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even
when John goes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be
used to bring his body back to the ancestral burying ground.
In a land so given over to superstition I have no doubt
that the most horrible disasters would also be expected
as the penalty for interfering with any grave. It seems odd
that a people who had a literature centuries before our Anglo-
Saxon ancestors emerged from barbarism should now be the
victims of superstitions almost as gross as those prevailing in
Africa; but such are the facts. Chang Chih-tung, who died a
few months ago, was one of the most progressive and en-
lightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but not
even a man of his type could free himself from the great body
of superstition handed down from generation to generation.
In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as
"Dragon Hill," because of the Chinese belief that a dragon in-
habits it. This long hill divides the city into two parts; every
day hundreds and sometimes possibly thousands of people
must climb up one side and down the other in getting from one
part of the town to another. Therefore, when Chang Chih-
FROM PEEING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 129
tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that he would make a
cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble. And he
did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a pain-
ful abscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he con-
sulted were quick in pointing out the trouble. By making
the cut in the hill, they told him, he had offended the earth
dragon which inhabits it, and unless the cut were filled up Chang
might die and disaster might come upon the city. Of course,
there was nothing for him to do but to restore the ancient
obstruction to travel, and so it remains to this day.
In sight from Dragon Hill is another hill known as Tortoise
Hill, supposed to be inhabited by a tortoise spirit or devil, and
at its foot are some lakes in which it has long been said that the
tortoise washes its feet. Now these lakes are on property
owned by the Hanyang Steel & Iron Works and they decided
a few years ago that they would either drain off the water or
else fill up the lakes so as to get more land. But before they
got started the Chinese civil authorities heard of it and notified
the Hanyang Company that such a proceeding could not be
tolerated. The tortoise would have nowhere to wash his
feet, and would straightway bring down the wrath of Heaven
on all the community!
It is from superstitions such as these that the schools must
free the Chinese before the way can be really cleared for the
introduction of Christianity. The teacher is as necessary as
the preacher. And the task of getting the masses even to the
point where they can read and write is supremely difficult.
The language, it must be remembered, has no alphabet.
Each word is made not by joining several letters together,
as with us, but by making a distinct character — each char-
acter an intricate and difficult combination of lines, marks, and
dots. Or perhaps the word may be formed by joining two dis-
tinct characters together. For example, to write "obedience"
in Chinese you write together the characters for "leaf" and
"river," the significance being that true obedience is as trusting
130 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
and unresisting as the fallen leaf on the river's current. My
point is, however, that for each word a distinct group of marks
(like mixed-up chicken tracks) must be piled together, and the
task of remembering how to recognize and write the five thou-
sand or more characters in the language would make an average
American boy turn gray at the very thought. My friend
Doctor Tenney, of the American Legation in Peking, asserts
that at least five years of the average Chinese pupil's school
life might be saved if the language were based on an alphabet
like ours instead of on such arbitrary word-signs.
There is one thing that must be said in favor of the Chinese
system of education, however, and that is the emphasis it has
always laid on moral or ethical training. The teaching, too,
seems to have been remarkably effective. Take so basic a
matter as paying one's debts, for example: it is a part of the
Chinaman's religion to get even with the world on every Chinese
New Year, which comes in February. If he fails to "square
up" at this time he "loses face," as his expressive phrase has
it. He is a bad citizen and unpopular. Consequently all
sorts of things may be bought cheaper just before the New
Year than any other time. Every man is willing to make any
reasonable sacrifice, selling his possessions at a great discount
if necessary, rather than have a debt against him run over
into the new period — an excellent idea for America !
I do not know whether Confucianism is responsible for this
particular policy, but at any rate the fact remains that outside
the Bible the world has never known a more sublime moral
philosophy than that of Confucius. It means much, therefore,
that every Chinese pupil must know the maxims and principles
of the great sage by heart. Moreover, as Confucius did not
profess to teach spiritual truth, the missionaries in China are
fast coming to realize that it is both unnecessary and foolish
to urge the people to abandon Confucianism. The proper
policy is to tell the Chinese, "Hold on to all that is good and
true in Confucius. There is very little in his teachings that is
FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 131
in conflict with religion, and Christian leaders now recognize
him as one of the greatest moral forces the world has known.
But to the high moral teaching of the Chinese master you must
add now the moral teachings of Christianity and, more essen-
tial still, the great body of spiritual truth which Confucianism
lacks." The grand old man among Chinese missionaries.
Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who has been in the work since 1850,
said to me in Peking, "Some of the best Christians are now
the best Confucianists."
Confucianism, as any one can see by reading the books, is
no more a substitute for Christianity than Proverbs is for St.
John's Gospel. As Doctor Brewster, another missionary, says,
"We do not ask an American scholar to renounce Plato to
become a Christian; why should we ask a Chinaman to re-
nounce Confucius.''"
Confucius lived five centuries before Christ, and at his
old home in Shantung are the graves alike of his descendants
and his ancestors — the oldest family burying ground in the
world. "No monarch on earth can trace back his lineage by
an unbroken chain through .so many centuries." In Peking
I was so fortunate as to form a friendship with a descendant of
Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation — Mr. Kung Hsiang
Koh — a promising and gifted senior in the Imperial College
of Languages. At my request he inscribed a scroll for me in
beautiful Chinese characters, representing one of my favorite
quotations from his world-famous ancestor. I give an English
translation herewith:
"Szema-New asked about the Superior Man. The Master said, 'The su-
perior man is without anxiety or fear.'
" 'Being without anxiety or fear,' said New, 'does this constitute what we
should call the superior man?'
"The Master replied, 'When a man looks inward and finds no guilt there,
why shoiild he grieve? or what should he fear?"*
On board S. S. Kutwo,
Yangtze River, China.
XIV
SIDELIGHTS ON CHINESE CHARACTER
AND INDUSTRY
AVING mentioned some of the good points of John
Chinaman (and he has many excellent points), it
is also necessary to point out some of his short-
comings. The trouble with John is that he had
some tiptop ancestors, but he fell into the habit of looking
backward at them so continuously that he has failed, in recent
centuries, to make any further progress. He had a civiliza-
tion and a literature when our white ancestors were wearing
skins; but there he stopped, so that we have not only caught
up with him, but have passed him almost immeasurably.
The result is that now China is waking up to find that a great
number of ancient abuses, both in public and private life,
must be sloughed off if she is to become a genuinely healthy
modern nation.
Of what has been accomplished with reference to opium
I have already written at length. But this is only a beginning.
With the opium evil under foot, China will still have other
dragons to slay — if I may use the term dragon in an evil
sense in a country whose national emblem is the dragon. For
one thing, slavery still exists in China. A friend of mine in
Peking told me of an acquaintance, an educated Chinaman,
who bought a young girl two years ago for two hundred taels
(about $120 gold), and says now he would not take one thousand
two hundred (about $720 gold). Already, however, a vigor-
ous sentiment for the complete abolition of slavery has devel-
132
CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 133
oped over the empire. About six months ago an imperial
edict was issued prohibiting slave trading, decreeing that
child-slaves should become free on reaching the age of twenty-
five, and opening ways for older slaves to buy their freedom.
The peons or slaves of the Manchu princes were, however,
excepted from the terms of this edict.
Foot-binding also continues a grievous and widespread evil.
Formerly every respectable Chinese father bound the feet of
all his girls. Fathers who did not were either degraded men,
reckless of public opinion, or so bitterly poor as to require
the services of their daughters in unremitting manual labor.
Consequently, a natural foot on a woman became a badge of
social inferiority: a Chinaman of prominence wouldn't marry
her. Now, however, many of the wealthier upper-class China-
men in the cities are letting their girls grow up with unbound
feet, and this custom will gradually spread until the middle
and lower classes generally, seeing that fashion no longer decrees
such a barbaric practice, will also abandon it.
The progress of the reform, however, is by no means so rapid
as could be wished. A father with wealth may risk getting a
husband for his daughter even though she has natural feet, but
ambitious fathers among the common people fear to take such
risks. An American lady whose home I visited has a servant
who asked for two or three weeks' leave of absence last summer,
explaining that he wished to bind the feet of his baby daughter.
My friend, knowing all the cruelty of the practice, and having
a heart touched by memories of the heart-rending cries with
which the poor little creatures protest for weeks against their
suffering, pleaded with the servant to let the child's feet alone.
But to no effect. "Big feet no b'long pretty," he said, and
went home unconvinced.
"The feet," according to the brief statement of ex-Minister
Charles Denby, "are bandaged at an age varying from three to
five years. The toes are bent back until they penetrate the
sole of the foot, and are tightly bound in that position. The
134. WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
parts fester and the toes grow into the foot." The result is
that women grow up with feet the same size as when they were
children, and the flesh withers away on the feet and below the
knees. Throughout life the fashion-cursed girl and woman
must hobble around on mere stumps. When you first see a
Chinese woman with bound feet you are reminded of the old
pictures of Pan, the imaginary Greek god with the body of a
man and the feet of a goat. The resemblance to goat's feet
is remarkably striking. As the women are unable to take
proper exercise — except with great pain — there is little
doubt that their physical strength has been seriously im-
paired by this custom, and that the stamina of the whole race
as well has suffered in consequence.
Whenever a foreigner — it is the white man who is "the for-
eigner" over here — begins a comparison or contract between
the Chinese and the Japanese, he is sure to mention among the
first two or three things the vast difference in moral standards
with regard to family life. The cleanness of the family life
in China, he will tell you, is one of the great moral assets of
the race, while the contrary conditions largely prevailing in
Japan would seem to threaten ultimate disaster to the people.
As in most Asiatic countries, however, there is in China no
very definite moral sentiment against a man's marrying more
than one wife. In fact, it is regarded not as a question of morals
but of expense. It is one of the privileges of the Chinaman
who can afford it, and the No. 1 wife is often glad for her hus-
band to take a No. 2 and a No. 3 wife, because the secondary
wives are somewhat under her authority and relieve her of
much work and worry. A few months ago a Chinaman in
Hankow had a very capable No. 2 wife who was about to quit
him to work for some missionaries, whereupon Wife No. 1,
Wife No. 3, and the much-worried husband all joined in a
protest against the household's losing so capable a woman.
All these three wives were in subjection to the husband's
mother, however, until the old lady took cholera last year, and
CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 1S5
in a day or so was dead. The prevalence of awful scourges,
such as cholera and bubonic plague, is another evil which the
new China must conquer. These diseases are due mainly,
of course, to unsanitary ways of living, and when you have
been through a typical Chinese city you wonder that anybody
escapes. The streets are so narrow that with outstretched
arms you can almost reach from side to side, and the unmen-
tionable foulness of them often smells to heaven.
Moreover, if you have the idea that the typical Chinaman
is content to live only on rice, prepare to abandon it. Hogs
are more common in a village of Chinamen than dogs in a
village of negroes; and, in some cases, almost equally at home
in the houses. I saw a Chinese woman in Kiukiang feeding
a fat porker in the front room, while, in the narrow streets
around, hogs and dogs were wandering together or lying con-
tentedly asleep in the sunshine by the canal bank. In fact,
the ancient Chinese character for "home" is composed of two
characters — "pig" and "shelter" — a home being thus rep-
resented as a pig under a shelter!
Small wonder that cholera is frequent, smallpox a scourge,
and leprosy in evidence here and there. Quite recently a
couple of mission teachers of my denomination have died of
smallpox: they "didn't believe in vaccination." Shanghai,
as I write this, is just recovering from a bubonic plague scare.
There were one or two deaths from the plague among the
Chinese, whereupon the foreigners put into force such drastic
quarantine regulations that the Chinese rebelled with riots.
The whites then put their cannon into position, the volunteer
soldiers were called out, and it looked at one time as if I should
find the city in a state of bloody civil war, but fortunately the
trouble seems now to have blown over.
Unfortunately the ignorant Chinese put a great deal more
faith in patent medicines and patent medicine fakirs than
they do in approved sanitary measures. It is interesting to
find that American patent medicines discredited at home by
136 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
the growing intelligence of our people have now taken refuge
in the Orient, and are coining the poor Chinaman's ignorance
into substantial shekels. Worst of all, some of the rehgious
papers over here are helping them to delude the unintelligent,
just as too many of our church papers at home are doing.
In Shanghai I picked up a weekly publication printed in
Chinese and issued by the Christian Literature Society, and
asked what was the advertisement on the back. "Dr. Wil-
liams's Pink Pills for Pale People," was the answer.
One of the most pecuhar things about China is the exist-
ence of almost unlimited official corruption side by side with
high standards of honesty and morahty in ordinary business or
private life. I have already referred to the system of " squeeze"
or graft by which almost every official gets the bulk of his
earnings. In Shanghai it is said that the Taotai, or chief official
there, paid $50,000 (gold) for an office for which the salary is
only $1500 (gold) a year.
Against this concrete evidence of official corruption place
this evidence of a high sense of honor in private life. A young
Chinaman, employed in a position of trust in Hankow, em-
bezzled some money. The company, knowing that his family
was one of some standing, notffied the father. He and his sons,
brothers of the thief, went after the young fellow and killed
him with an ax. The community as a whole approved the
action, because in no other way could the father free his family
from the disgrace and ostracism it would have incurred by
having an embezzler in it.
The Yangtze River trip from Hankow to Shanghai, men-
tioned in my last letter, I found very interesting. W^e were
three days going the 600 miles. The Yangtze is the third
largest river in the world and navigable 400 miles beyond
Hankow, or 1000 miles in all. It would be navigable much
farther but for a series of waterfalls. Nearly thirty miles
wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean's
blue forty miles out in the Pacffic, I am told. In fact, I think
;3 . % d>^
FASHIONABLE CHINESE DINNER PARTY
HOW LUMBER IS SAWED IN THE ORIENT — THERE ARE PRACTI-
CALLY NO SAW MILLS
R.
^ n o
/?-
^
7^
?:?*
A QUOTATION FROM CONFUCIUS
This is the upper part of a scroll kindly written for the author by Mr. Kung
Ilsiang Koh (or Alfred E. Kung as he signs himself in English). Mr Kung is
a descendant of Confucius (Kung Fut-zu) of the seventy-fifth generation, and the
complete quotation of which the scroll is a reproduction in Chinese characters
reads as follows'
"Ssu-ma Niu asked for a definition of the princely man.
"The Master said: 'The princely man is one who knows neither grief nor
fear.' 'Absence of grief and fear?' said Niu, 'Is this the mark of a princely man?'
The Master said, 'If a man look into his heart and find no guilt there, why should
he grieve? Or of what should he be afraid?' "
CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 139
it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgid
stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow
the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently,
when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor
boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were the waves, but a rather
rickety looking little native canoe called a "sampan," with
tattered sails, bobbing up and down like a cork, finally landed
me safely across the three or four miles of sea-like waves. All
the way from Hankow to Peking one encounters all sorts of
Chinese junks and other odd river-craft. In many cases they
look like the primitive Greek and Roman boats of which one
sees pictures in the ancient histories. The Chinese are excel-
lent sailors and manage their boats very skilfully. The great-
est canal that the world knows was begun by them in the time
of Nebuchadnezzar and finished thirteen centuries ago.
Until very recently, however, the Chinese have not wanted
railways. Coming from Hankow to Shanghai I passed in
sight of the site of the old Woosung-Shanghai Railway, the
first one built in China; but before it got well started the
people tore it up and threw it into the river.
In Shanghai I met his Excellency Wu Ting Fang, formerly
Minister to the United States, and he told me of his troubles
in building, under Li Hung Chang's directions, what turned
out to be the first permanent railway in China. This was less
than twenty-five years ago. Li Hung Chang said to Mr.
Wu: "If we ask the authorities to let us build a railway,
they'll refuse, so I am going to take the responsibility myself.
The only way to overcome the prejudice against railways is
to let the people see that a railroad isn't the evil they think
it is." Accordingly, Mr. Wu set to wort on the Tongshan
Railway. He built first ten miles, then twenty more. Then
as the road was working well, and its usefulness demonstrated,
he and Li Hung Chang thought they might get permission from
the Throne to construct a line from Tientsin to Peking. Suc-
cessful in this effort, they went ahead with the survey and im-
140 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAEJNG UP
ported from America the materials for building the line —
and then came a new edict forbidding them to proceed! The
matter had been taken up by the viceroys and governors, and
80 per cent, of them had opposed building the line!
Now, less than twenty-five years later, John Chinaman is
calling for railroads in almost every non-railroad section, and
the railroads already built are paying handsome dividends.
Everybody seems to travel. Besides the first-class and sec-
ond-class coaches, most trains carry box-cars, very much like
cattle-cars and without seats of any kind, for third-class pas-
sengers. And I don't recall having seen one yet that wasn't
chock full of Chinamen, happy as a similar group of Americans
would be in new automobiles. A missionary along the fine
between Hankow and Peking says that he now makes a 200-
mile trip in five hours which formerly took him nineteen days.
Before the railway came he had to go by wheelbarrow, ten
miles a day, his luggage on one side the wheel, and himself on
the other. Thousands of these wheelbarrows, doing freight
and passenger business, are in use in Shanghai and the regions
roundabout. A frame about three feet wide and four feet
long is built over and around the wheel, and a coolie will
carry as much as half a ton on one of them.
Along the Yangtze a considerable quantity of cotton is
grown, and I went out into some of the fields in the neighbor-
hood of Shanghai. The stalks were dead, of course, and in
some cases women were pulling them up for fuel, but I could
see that the Chinese is a poorer variety than our American
cotton, and is cultivated more poorly. Instead of planting in
rows as we do, the peasants about Shanghai broadcast in
"lands" eight or ten feet wide, as we sow wheat and oats.
About Shanghai they do not use the heavier two and three
horse plows I found about Peking; consequently the land is
poorly broken to begin with, and the cultivation while the crop
is growing amounts to very little. No sort of seed selection or
variety breeding has ever* been attempted. No wonder that
CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 141
the stalks are small, the bolls small and few in number, and
the staple also very short.
From my observation I should say that with better va=
rieties and better cultivation CJiina could easily double her
yields without increasing her acreage. There is likely to be
some increase in acreage, too, however, because farmers who
have had to give up poppy culture are in search of a new
money crop, and in most cases will take up cotton.
As I have said before, the coolie class wear padded clothes
all winter, and as they have no fire in their houses, they natur-
ally have to wear several suits even of the padded sort. I
remember a speech Congressman Richmond P. Hobson made
several years ago in which he spoke of having seen Chinamen
with clothes piled on, one suit on top of another, until they
looked like walking cotton bales. Some of his hearers may
have thought this an exaggeration, but if so, I wish to give
him the support of my own observation and that of a
preacher. As a Chinaman came in the street-car in Shanghai
Friday my missionary host remarked: "That fellow has on
four or five suits already, and he'll put on more as the
weather gets colder."
Mr. Currie, the English superintendent of the International
Cotton Mills at Shanghai, told me as I went through his factory
that the Chinese men and women he employs average about
12 cents a day (American money), but that from his experi-
ence in England he would say that English labor at 80
cents or a dollar a day is cheaper. "You'd have more for
your money at the week's end. One white girl will look after
four sides of a ring spinning frame; it takes six Chinese, as you
see. Then, again, the one white girl would oil her own machine;
the Chinese will not. In the third place, in England two over-
seers would be enough for this room, while here we must have
seven."
Hong Kong.
XV
FAREWELL TO CHINA
WITH this letter we bid farew*ell to China. When I
see it again it wUl doubtless be greatly changed.
Already I have come too late to see poppy fields
or opium dens; too late to see the old-time cells
in which candidates for office were kept during their exami-
nation periods; too late, I am told, to find the flesh of cats or
dogs for sale in the markets. If I had waited five years longer,
it is likely that I should not have found the men wearing their
picturesque queues and half -shaven heads; before five years,
too, a parliament and a cabinet wUl have a voice in the gov-
ernment in which untU now the one potent voice has been
that of the Emperor, the "Son of Heaven" divinely appointed
to rule over the Middle Kingdom. All over the country the
people are athrUl with a new life. Unless present signs fail, the
century will not be old before the Dragon Empire, instead of
being a country hardly consulted by the Powers about matters
affecting its own interests, will itself become one of the Powers
and will have to be consulted about affairs in other nations.
Be it said, to begin with, that I am just back from Canton,
the most populous city in China and supposedly one of the
half dozen most populous in the whole world. As no census
has ever been taken, it is impossible to say how many people
it really does contain. The estimates vary all the way from
a million and a half to three millions. Half a million people,
it is said, live on boats in the river. Some of them are born,
marry, grow old, and die without ever having known a home
142
FAREWELL TO CHINA 143
on land. And these boats, it should be remembered, are no
larger than a small bedroom at home. I saw many of them
yesterday afternoon, and I also saw many of the women
managing them. The women boatmen — or boat-women —
of Canton are famous.
Think of a city of two or three million people without a
vehicle of any kind — wagon, buggy, carriage, street-car,
automobile, or even a rickshaw! And yet this is what Canton
appears to be. I didn't see even a wheelbarrow. The streets
are too narrow for any travel except that of pedestrians, and
the only men not walking are those borne on the shoulders
of men who are walking. My guide (who rejoices in the
name of Ah Cum John) and I went through in sedan chairs —
a sort of chair with light, narrow shafts before and behind.
These shafts fit over the heads and bare shoulders of three
coolies, or Chinese laborers, and it is these human burden-
bearers who showed us the sights of Canton.
To get an idea of what the city is like, fancy an area of about
thirty square miles crowded with houses as thick as they can
stand, every house jam up against its neighbors, with only
walls between — no room for yards or parks or driveways —
and these houses dense with people! Then punch into these
square miles of houses a thousand winding alleys, no one wide
enough to be called a street, and fill up these alleys also
with hurrying, perspiring, pig-tailed Chinamen. There are no
stores, shops or offices such as would look familiar to an Amer-
ican, but countless thousands of Chinese shops wide open to
the streets, with practically no doors in evidence.
Such is Canton: a human hive of industry: a maze of laby-
rinthine alleys crowded with people, the alleys or streets too
narrow to get the full light of day!
Outside this crowded city of Canton's living masses is the
even larger and more crowded city of Canton's dead. From
the highest point on the city wall my guide pointed out an
unbroken cemetery extending for ten miles: the hills dotted
144 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
with mounds until they have the appearance of faces pitted
by smallpox.
For the Chinaman, however unimportant in actual life, be-
comes a man of importance as soon as he dies, and his grave
must be carefully looked after. The finest place I saw in
Canton was the mortuary where the dead bodies of wealthy
Chinamen are kept until burial. The handsome coffins I
saw ranged in value from $1400 to $2700 Mexican, or half
these amounts American money. The lacquered surfacing ac-
counts for the high cost.
Nor are these departed Celestials kept here for a few days
only. Sometimes it is a matter of several years, my guide
told me, the geomancers or fortune-tellers being employed all
this time in finding a suitable site for a grave. These miser-
able scoundrels pretend that the soul of the dead man will not
rest unless he is buried in just the right spot and in just the
right kind of soil. Perhaps no professional man in China earns
as much as these fakirs. Sometimes it happens that after a
man has been dead two or three years his family suffers a series
of misfortunes. A frequent explanation in such cases is that
the wrong site has been chosen for the dead man's burial place.
Another geomancer is then hired and told to find a new grave
where the soul will rest in peace. Of course, he charges a
heavy fee.
In one $1400 coffin I saw was the body of a wealthy young
Chinaman who died last spring. Three times a day a new cup
of tea is placed on the table for his spirit, and on the walls of
the room were scores of silk scrolls, fifteen feet long, express-
ing the sympathy of friends and relatives. Around the coffin,
too, were almost life-size images of servants, and above it a
heap of gilded paper to represent gold. When the geomancers
finally find a suitable grave for the poor fellow he will be buried,
and these paper servants and this paper gold will be burned, in
the belief that they will be converted into real servants and
real gold for his use in the spirit world.
FAREWELL TO CHINA 145
A friend of mine in Peking who saw the funeral of the late
Emperor and Empress Dowager told me some interesting
stories of the truly Oriental ceremonies then celebrated. Tons
of clothes and furs were burned, and vast quantities of imita-
tion money. A gorgeous imitation boat, natural size and com-
plete in every detail from cabins to anchors, steamer chairs,
and ample decks, was fitted up at a cost of $36,000 American
money, and burned. Furthermore, as my friend was coming
home one evening, he was surprised to see in an unexpected
place, some distance ahead, a full regiment of soldiers, gor-
geous in new uniforms, and hundreds of handsome cavalry
horses. Getting closer, what was his amazement to find that
these natural-size soldiers and steeds were only make-believe
affairs to be burned for the dead monarchs! To maintain
their rank in the Beyond they must have at least one full
regiment at their command !
Since we are on such gruesome subjects we might as well
finish with them now by considering the punishments in China.
I went out to the execution grounds in Canton, but it hap-
pened to be an off-day when nobody was due to suffer the
death sentence. I did see the cross, though, on which the
worst criminals are stretched and strangled before they are
beheaded. The bodies of these malefactors are not allowed
ordinary burial, but quick-limed, I believe. There were human
bones beside the old stone wall where I walked, and when a
Chinese brat lifted for a moment a sort of jute-bagging cover
from a barrel the topmost skull of the heap grinned ghastly
in the sunlight.
The cruelty of Chinese punishments is a blot upon her civ-
ilization. When I was in Shanghai a friend of mine told me
of having been to a little town where two men had just been
executed for salt-smuggling. Salt is a government monopoly
in China, or at least is subject to a special revenue duty, so
that salt smuggling is about equivalent to blockading whiskey
in America.
146 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Recognized forms of punishment are death by starvation
and "death by the seventy -two cuts" — gradually chopping
a man to pieces as if he were a piece of wood. This latter
punishment is for treason. To let a bad criminal be hanged
instead of beheaded is regarded as a favor, the explanation
being that the man who has his head cut off is supposed to be
without a head in the hereafter.
The worst feature of the whole system is the treatment of
prisoners to make them confess. The Chinese theory is that
no one should be punished unless he confesses with his own
mouth. Consequently the most brutal, sickening tortures
are practised to extort confession, and, in the end, thousands
and thousands of innocent men, no doubt, rather than Hve
longer in miseries far worse than death, have professed crimes
of which they were innocent.
But let us turn now to happier topics : — say to an illus-
tration of Chinese humor. Very well; here is the sort of
story that tickles a Chinaman : it is one they tell themselves :
A Chinaman had a magic jar. And when you think of a
jar here don't think of one of the tiny affairs such as Americans
use for preserves and jams. The jar here means a big affair
about half the size of a hogshead: I bathed in one this morn-
ing. It was in such jars that Ali Baba's Forty Thieves con-
cealed themselves. Well, this magic jar had the power of
multiplying whatever was put into it. If you put in a suit
of clothes, behold, you could pull out perhaps two or three
dozen suits! If you put in a silver dollar, you might get out
a hundred silver dollars. There doesn't seem to have been
any regularity about the jar's multiplying properties. Some-
times it might multiply by two, while again it might multiply
by a hundred.
At any rate, the owner of the magic receptacle was gettmg
rich fairly fast, when a greedy judge got word of the strange
affair somehow. Accordingly he made some kind of false
charge against the man and made him bring the jar into court.
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
CHINESE woman's RUINED FEET
The building of the Great Wall, considered simply as a feat of Herculean
labor, leaves us no room to boast over the Panama Canal
The lower picture shows the terrible deformity produced by foot-binding
CHIXI<:SE SCHOOL CHILDREN
THE AMERICAN CONSULATE AT ANTUNG
The upper picture suggests a word about the amazing fertility of tbe Oriental
races — the Japanese, for example, increasing from their birth-rate alone as
fast as the United States from its birth-rate plus its enormous immigration
A great need of America in the East is better consular buildings. Witness
this one at Antung
FAREWELL TO CHINA 149
Then the judge pretended that he couldn't decide about the
case, or else pretended that the man needed punishment for
something, and so wrongly refused to give the citizen's property
back. Instead the magistrate took the jar into his own home
and himself began to get rich on its labors.
Now, when this happened, the friends of the mistreated man
began to murmur. Failing to do anything with the mag-
istrate, they appealed to the magistrate's father — for though
you may be fifty or seventy years old in China, if your father
is living you are as much subject to his orders as if you were
only ten; this is the case just as long as you both live. But
when the father spoke about the complaints of the people the
magistrate lied about the jar somehow, but not in a way
entirely to deceive the old fellow. He decided to do some
investigating, and went blundering around into a dark room
in search of the jar, and before he saw what he was doing came
upon it and fell into it. Whereupon he cried to his son to
pull him out.
The son did come, but when he pulled out one father, be-
hold there was another still in the jar — and then another and
another and another. He pulled out one father after another
till the whole room was full of fathers, and then he filled up
the yard with fathers, and had six or eight standing like chick-
ens on the stone wall before the accursed old jar would quit !
And to have left one father in there would naturally have
been equivalent to murder.
So this was the punishment of the unjust magistrate. He
had, of course, to support all the dozens of aged fathers he
pulled out of the jar (a Chinaman must support his father
though he starve himself), and it is to be supposed that he used
up all the wealth he had unjustly piled up, and had to work
night and day as well all the rest of his life. Of course the jar,
too, had to be returned to its owner, and in this way the whole
community learned of the magistrate's unfairly withholding it.
This story is interesting not only for its own sake, but for
150 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
the light it sheds on Chinese life — the relations of father and
son; the unjust oppression of the people by the oflScials in a
land where the citizen is without the legal rights fundamental
in American government; and, lastly, the "Arabian Nights"-
like flavor of this typically Chinese piece of fiction.
One of the funny things among the many funny things I
have encountered in China is the pecuHar way of buying or
selling land, as reported to me by Rev. Dr. R. T. Bryan. If
you buy land from a Chinaman, about Shanghai at least,
without knowing the custom of the country, you may have to
make him three additional payments before you get through
with him. For, according to the custom, after the first pay-
ment he will give you a deed, but after a little while will come
around sighing, regretting that he sold the land and complain-
ing that you didn't pay enough. Accordingly, you will pay
him a little more, and he will give you what is called a "sigh-
ing paper," certifying that the "sighing money" has been
paid. A few days or weeks pass and he turns up again. You
didn't pay him quite enough before. Therefore, you make
another small payment and he gives you the "add-a-little-
more" paper showing that the "add-a-Httle-more" money has
been paid. Last of all, you make what is called the "pull-up-
root" payment, and the land is safely yours.
Of course, the impatient foreigner hasn't time for this sort
of thing, consequently he pays enough more in the beginning
1o cancel these various dramatic performances. Doctor
Bryan's deed certifies that the "sighing money," " add-a-little-
more money," and "pull-up-root money" have all been settled
to start with.
"Pidgin English," or the corruptions of English words and
phrases by means of which foreigners and Chinese exchange
ideas, is also very amusing. "Pidgin English" means "business
English," "pidgin" representing the Chinaman's attempt to
say "business." Some of the Chinese phrases are very useful,
such as "maskee" for our "never mind." Other good phrases
FAREWELL TO CHINA 151
are ** chop-chop" for "hurry up," "chin-chin" for "greeting,"
and "chow-chow" for "food."
"Have you had plenty chow-chow?" my good-natured Chi-
nese elevator-boy in Shanghai used to say to me after dinner;
and the bright-eyed little brats at the temples in Peking used
to explain their failure to do anything forbidden by saying
they should get "plenty bamboo chow-chow"! Bamboos are
used for switches (as well as for ten thousand other things),
and "bamboo chow-chow" means the same thing to the Chi-
nese boy as "hickory tea" to an American boy!
A Scotch fellow-passenger was telling me the other day of
the sajnng that "The Scotchman keeps the Sabbath day, and
every other good thing he can lay his hands on." Now, the
Chinaman, unlike the Scotchman, doesn't keep the Sabbath,
but he does live up to all the requirements of the second clause
of the proverb. Nothing goes to waste in China except hu-
man labor, of which enough is wasted every year to make a
whole nation rich, simply because it is not aided by effective
implements and machinery. The bottles, the tin cans, the
wooden boxes, the rags, the orange peels — everything we
throw away — is saved. And the coolies work from early
morn till late at night and every day in the week. Their
own religion does not teach them to observe the seventh day,
and this requirement of Christianity, in China as well as in
Japan, is regarded as a great hardship upon its converts.
Buddhism in China, as in Japan, it may also be observed Just
here, is now only a hideous mixture of superstition and fraud.
As I found believers in the Japanese temples rubbing images
of men and bulls to cure their own pains, so in the great Bud-
dhist temple at Canton I found the fat Buddha's body rubbed
slick in order to bring flesh to thin supplicants, while one of
the chief treasures of the temple is a pair of "fortune sticks."
If the Chinese Buddhist wishes to undertake any new task or
project, he first comes to the priest and tries out its advisa-
bility with these "fortune sticks." If, when dropped to the
152 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
floor, they lie in such a position as to indicate good luck, he
goes ahead; otherwise he is likely to abandon the project.
Let me close this chapter by noting a remark made to me by
Dr. Timothy Richard, one of the most eminent religious and
educational workers in the empire.
"Do you know what has brought about the change in
China?" he asked me one day in Peking. "Well, I'll tell you:
it is a comparative view of the world. Twenty years ago
the Chinese did not know how their country ranked with other
countries in the elements of national greatness. They had
been told that they were the greatest, wisest, and most power-
ful people on earth, and they didn't care to know what other
countries were doing. Since then, however, they have studied
books, have sent their sons to foreign colleges and universities,
and they have found out in what particulars China has fallen
behind other nations. Now they have set out to remedy
these defects. The comparative view of the world is what
is bringing about the remaking of China."
In China, no doubt, the men who have brought the people
this "comparative view of the world" were criticised some-
times for presuming to suggest that any other way might be
better than China's way; but they kept to their work — and
have won. Doctor Richard himself did much effective service
by publishing a series of articles and diagrams showing how
China compared with other countries in area, population,
education, wealth, revenue, military strength, etc. Such com-
parisons are useful for America as a country, and for individ-
ual states and sections as well.
Hong Kong, China.
XVI
WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES
OF THE cruelty of Chinese punishments I have
already had something to say, but there is at least
one thing that should be said for the Chinese officials
in this connection: No matter how heinous his
crime, they have never sent a criminal from Hong Kong to
Manila in an Indo-China boat in the monsoon and typhoon
season.
Dante could have found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the
voyage as I made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday
night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean
over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost
completely to one side, shivered, trembled, and recovered itself,
only to yield again to the wrath and fury of mountain-like waves
hurled thundering against it and over it. The crack where
the door fitted over the sill furnished opening enough to flood
my cabin. In spite of the heat not even a crack could be
opened at the top of the window until Monday morning. A
bigger ship a few hours ahead of us found the sea in an even
more furious mood. The captain stayed on the bridge practi-
cally without sleep three days and nights, going to bed, spent
with fatigue and watching, as soon as he came at last into sight
of Manila. Two weeks ago the captain of another ship came
into port so much used up that he resigned and gave his first
mate command of the vessel, while still another vessel has just
limped into Manila disabled after bujffeting the storm for a
brief period.
153
154 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
At any rate, the trip is over now, and I write this in Manila,
with its tropical heat and vegetation, its historic associations,
its strange mixture of savage, Spanish, and American influences.
The Pasig River, made famous in the war days of '98, flows
past my hotel, and beautiful Manila Bay, glittering in the fierce
December sunlight, recalls memories of Dewey and our navy.
But the moss-green walls about the old Spanish city remind
us of days of romance and tragedy more fascinating than any
of the events of our own generation. In the days when Spain
made conquest of the world these streets were laid out, and the
statues of her sovereigns, imperious and imperial, still stand
here to remind us that nations, like men, are mortal, and that
for follies or mistakes a people no less surely than an individ-
ual must pay the price.
Nor let our own proud America, boasting of her greater area
and richer resources, think she may ignore the lessons the history
of her predecessors here may teach. The statue of Bourbon
Don Carlos in his royal robe that stands amid the perennial
green of the Cathedral Park — it may well bring our American
officers who look out daily upon it, and the other Americans
who come here, a feeling not of pride but of profound and
reverent humility:
" God of Our Fathers, known'of old.
Lord of our far-flung battle-line.
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dommion over palm and pine.
Judge of the nations, spare us yet,]
Lest we forget, lest we forget ! "
In order to see what the Philippine country looks like, I
left Manila Thursday and made the long, hot trip to Daguban,
travelling through the provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga,
Tarlac, and Pangasinan. The first four of these are known as
Tagalog provinces; the fifth is inhabited by Ilocanos and Pam-
pangans. Three dialects or languages are spoken by the
WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES 155
tribes in the territory covered. Not far beyond Daguban are
savage dog-eating, head-hunting tribes; taos, or peasants, buy
dogs around Daguban and sell to these savages at good profits.
The provinces I travelled through are typical of Filipinoland
generally. Rather sparsely settled, only the smaller part of
the land is under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high
tigbao or Tampa grass, or covered with small forest trees.
Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo
is most in evidence; but the broad-leaved banana ranks easily
next. The high topknot growth of the cocoanut palm and
the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papaya afford a spectacle
unlike anything we see at home. About Daguban especially
many cocoanuts are grown, and the clumps of trees by the
Agno River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River
Nile in the time of Pharaoh — especially when I looked at
the plowing going on around them. For the Filipino's plow
is modelled closely on the old Egyptian implement, and hasn't
been much changed. A properly crooked small tree or limb
serves for a handle, another crooked bough makes the beam,
and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, some of
the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A
piece of wood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another
piece like U with the prongs pulled wide apart serves as a single-
tree. Then, with two pieces of rope connecting primitive
hame and single-tree, the Filipino's harness is complete.
Before going into any further description of the plows, how-
ever, let us get our picture of the typical country on the Island
of Luzon as I saw it on this hot December day. Great fields
of rice here and there, ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring
little brown men and women cutting the crop with old-fashioned
knives and sickles; the general appearance not unlike an
American wheat or oat harvest in early summer. Bigger fields
of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper two feet green,
the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some of
it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of
156 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp
low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small
freight boats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed out
of single logs.
Most striking of all are the houses in which the people live,
clustered in villages, as are farmhouses in almost every part
of the world except in America. Surrounded in most cases
by the massive luxuriance of a banana grove, the FiUpino's
hut stands on stilts as high as his head, and often higher.
One always enters by a ladder. In most instances there are
two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12 feet, and a sort of
lean-to adjoining, through which the ladder comes. A one-
horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the larger Filipino
home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber,
but of bamboo — the ever-serviceable bamboo — which, as my
readers probably know, strongly resembles the fishing-pole
reeds that grow on our river banks. The sills, sleepers, and
scaffolding of the house are made of larger bamboo trunks, six
inches or less in diameter; the split trunks form the floor;
the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat like that of
which we make our hamper baskets and split-bottom chairs;
the roofing is of nipal, which looks much like very long corn
shucks.
In short, imagine an enormous hamper basket, big enough
to hold six or eight hogsheads, put on stilts, and covered with
shucks: such in appearance is the Filipino's house. Around
it are banana trees bent well toward the ground by the weight
of the one great bunch at the top, and possibly a few bamboo
and cocoanut trees. For human ornaments there are rather
small and spare black-haired, black-eyed, brown-skinned men,
women, and children in clothing rather gayly colored — as
far as it goes : in some cases it doesn't go very far. The favorite
color with the women-folk is a sort of peach-blossom mixture
of pink and white or a bandanna-handkerchief combination
of red and white. Bare feet are most common, but many
A FILIPINO S HOME
Nearly all the native houses I saw in the rural Philippines were of this type
— about this size, set on stilts, and constructed of similar material. The
scene is not quite natural-looking, however, without a banana grove and a
fighting cock or two
THE CAKAJ5AO, THE WORK-STOCK OF THE MLIPIXOS
AN OLD SPANISH CATHEDRAL
Of all the native Oriental peoples, the Filipinos alone have become thoroughly
Christianized. The great majority are Catholics
WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES 159
wear slippers, and not a few are now slaves enough to fashion
to wear American shoes. The men, except the very poorest,
wear white, nor is it a white worn dark by dirt such as Koreans
wear, but a spotless, newly washed white. Nearly every Filipino
seems to have on clothes that were laundered the day before.
A sort of colored gauze is frequently the only outer garment
worn by either men or women on the upper part of the body.
The beast of burden in the Philippines, the ungainly, slow-
moving animal that pulls the one-handled plows and the two-
wheeled carts, is the carabao. The carabao, or water buffalo,
is about the size of an ordinary American ox, and much like
the ox, but his hide is black, thick, and looks almost as tough
as an alligator's; his horns are enormous, and he has very little
hair. Perhaps his having lived in the water so much accounts
for the absence of the hair. Even now he must every day
submerge himself contentedly in deep water, must cover his
body like a pig in a wallow: this is what makes life worth living
for him. Furthermore, when he gives word that he is thirsty
Mr. Tao (the peasant) must not delay watering him; in this
hot climate thirst may drive him furiously, savagely mad, and
the plowman may not be able to climb a cocoanut tree quick
enough to escape hurt.
I saw quite a few goats, some cattle, a few hogs, and, of course,
some dogs. Much as the Filipino may care for his dog, how-
ever, he always reserves the warmest place in his heart for
nothing else but his gamecock, his fighting rooster. Cock-
fighting, and the gambling inseparably connected with it, are
his delight, and no Southern planter ever regarded a favorite
fox-hound with more pride and affection than the Filipino
bestows on his favorite chicken. In grassy yards you will
see the rooster tied by one leg and turned out to exercise, as
we would stake a cow to graze, while his owner watches and
fondles him. I shall never forget a gray-headed, bright-eyed,
barefooted old codger I saw near Tarlac stroking the feathers
of his bird, while in his eyes was the pride as of a woman over
160 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
her first-born. A man often carries his gamecock with him
as a negro v/ould carry a dog, and he is as ready to back his
Judgment with his last centavo as was the owner of Mark
Twain's "Jumping Frog" before that ill-fated creature dined
too heartOy on buckshot. Sundays and saints' days are the
days for cock-fighting — and both come pretty often.
I wish I could give my readers a ghmpse of the passengers
who got on and off my train between Manila and Daguban:
Filipino women carrying baskets on their heads, smoking ciga-
rettes, and looking after babies — in some cases doing all three
at once; Filipino men, likewise smoking, and with various kinds
of luggage, including occasional gamecocks; Filipino children
in most cases "undressed exceedingly," as Mr. Kipling would
say; and American soldiers in khaki uniforms and helmets.
At one place a pretty little twelve-year-old girl gets aboard,
delighted that she is soon to see America for the first time in
six years. For a while I travel with an American surveyor
whose work is away out where he must swim unbridged streams,
guard against poisonous snakes, and sleep where he can.
An army surgeon tells me as we pass the site of a battle between
the Americans and the Filipino insurgents eleven years ago:
the Filipinos would not respect the Red Cross, and the doctors
and hospital corps had to work all night with their guns be-
side them, alternately bandaging wounds and firing on savages.
In telling me good-bye a young Westerner sends regards to
all America. "Even a piece of Arizona desert would look
good to me," he declares; "anything that's U.S.A." A young
veterinarian describes the government's efforts to exterminate
rinderpest, a disease which in some sections has killed nine
tenths of the carabao. A campaign as thorough and far-reaching
as that which the Agricultural Department at home is waging
against cattle ticks is in progress, but the ignorant farmers
cannot understand the regulations, and are greatly hindering
a work which means so much of good to them.
Such are a few snapshots of Philippine life.
WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES 161
Of the vast natural resources of the Philippines there can
be no question. With a fertile soil, varied products, immense
forest wealth, and possibly extensive mineral wealth; with
developing railway and steamship lines; with the markets of
the Orient right at her doors and special trade advantages with
the United States — with all these advantages, the islands
might soon become rich, if there were only an industrious pop-
ulation.
Unfortunately, the Filipino, however, doesn't like work.
Whether or not this dislike is incurable remains to be seen.
Perhaps as he comes into contact with civilization he may con-
ceive a liking for other things than rice, fish, a loin-cloth, and
shade — plenty of shade — and proceed to put forth the effort
necessary to get these other things. Already there seems
to have been a definite rise in the standards of living since the
American occupation. "When I came here in '98," Mr. Wil-
liam Crozier said to me, "not one native in a hundred wore
shoes, and hats were also the exception; you can see for yourself
how great is the change since then."
Moreover, in not a few cases Americans who have complained
of difiiculty in getting labor have been themselves to blame:
they tried to hire and manage labor the American way instead
of in the Filipino way. The custombre, as the Spanish call
it — that is to say, the custom of the country — is a factor
which no man can ignore without paying the penalty.
I am having to prepare this article very hurriedly, and I must
pospone my comment on the work of the American Government
until later. In closing, however, I am reminded that just as
the old proverb says, "It takes all sorts of people to make a
world," so I am seeing all sorts. A week ago yesterday the
Hong Kong papers announced that Mr. Clarence Poe would
be the guest at luncheon of his Excellency the Governor-
General, Sir Frederick Lugard, K. C. M. G., C. B., D. S. O.,
etc., and Lady Lugard, in the executive mansion; yesterday
162 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
I had "chow" (food) in a Filipino's place, "The Oriental
Hotel, Bar, and Grocery," away up in the Province of Pan-
gasinan, and climbed to my room and cot on a sort of ladder
or open work stairs such as one might expect to find in an ordi-
nary barn! It was the best place I could find in town.
Nor do the incongruities end here. After getting my even-
ing meal I walked out in the warm December moonlight, past
the shadows of the strange buildings and tropical trees — and
all at once there burst out the full chorus of one of the
world's great operas, the magnificent voice of a Campanini or
Caruso dominating all !
Great is the graphophone, advance agent of civilization!
Manila, P. I.
xvn
WHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN THE
PHILIPPINES
THERE are so many islands in the Philippine group,
which I have just left behind me (I write in a steamer
off ' ila), that if a man were to visit one a day,
wit at stopping for Sundays, it would take him
eight years to get around. Most of these islands though, of
course, are little more than splotches on the water's surface
and do not appear on the map. The two big ones, Mindanao
and Luzon, contain three fourths of the total land surface of
127,000 square miles, leaving the other one fourth to be divided
among the other 3138 islets.
The land area statistics just given indicate that the Philip-
pines are about the size of three average American states
and the population (7,000,000) is about three times that of an
average American commonwealth. There are only about
30,000 white people in the islands, and 50,000 Chinese. Chinese
immigration is now prohibited.
The 7,000,000 native Filipinos who make up practically
the entire population represent all stages of human progress.
The lowest of them are head-hunters and hang the skulls of
their human enemies outside their huts, as an American hunter
would mount the head of an elk or bear. The great majority,
however, have long been Christians and have attained a fair
degree of civilization. Even among the savage tribes a high
moral code is often enforced. The Igorrotes, for example,
though some of their number make it a condition of marriage
163
164 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
that the young brave shall have taken a head, shall have killed
his man, have remarkable standards of honor and virtue in
some respects, and formally visit the death penalty as the
punishment for adultery. Because roads or means of commu-
nication have been poor the people have mingled but little,
and there are three dozen different dialects. In the course
of a haK day's journey by rail I found three different lan-
guages spoken by the people along the route. The original
inhabitants were Negritos, a race of pigmy blacks, of whom
only a remnant remains, but the Filipino proper is a Malayan.
Filipinos are unique in that they alone among all the native
peoples of Asia have accepted Christianity. Fortunate in
being without the gold of Mexico or Peru, the Philippines did
not attract the more brutal Spanish adventurers who, about
the time of Magellan's discovery, were harrying wealthier
peoples with fire and sword. Instead of the soldier or the
adventurer, it was the priest, his soul aflame with love for his
church, who came to the Philippines, and the impression
made by his virtues was not negatived by the bloody crimes of
fellow Spaniards mad with lust of treasure. The result is
that to this day probably 90 per cent, of the Filipinos are Cath-
olics. Before the priests came, the people worshipped their
ancestors, as do other peoples in the Far East.
The only Asiatics who have accepted Christianity, the Fili-
pinos are also the only Asiatics among whom women are not
regarded as degraded and inferior beings. "If the Spaniards
had done nothing else here," as a high American official in Ma-
nila said to me, "though, as a matter of fact, we are beginning
to recognize that they did a great deal, they would deserve
well of history for what they have accomplished for the eleva-
tion of woman through the introduction of Christianity. No
other religion regards woman as man's equal."
The testimony I heard in the Philippines indicated that the
female partner in the household is, if anything, superior in
authority to the man. She is active in all the little business
THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 165
affairs of the family, and white people sometimes arrange with
Filipino wives for the employment of husbands!
The resources of the islands, as I have already said, are mag-
nificent and alluring. In the provinces through which I trav-
elled, less than 10 per cent, of the land seemed to be under culti-
vation, and statistics show that this is the general condition.
A small area has suflBced to produce a living for the tao, or
peasant, and he has not cultivated more — a fact due in part
to laziness and in part to poor means of transportation. What
need to produce what cannot be taken to market? This fact,
in my opinion, goes far to account for Filipino unaggressiveness.
According to the latest figures, the average size of the farms
in the Philippines, including the large plantations, is less than
eight acres, and the principal products are hemp, sugarcane,
tobacco, cocoanuts, and rice. The Manila hemp plant looks
for all the world like the banana plant (both belong to the same
family), and the newcomer cannot tell them apart. The
fibre is in the trunk or bark. Sisal hemp, which I found much
like our yucca or "bear grass," is but little grown. Sugar-
cane is usually cultivated in large plantations, as in Louisiana,
these plantations themselves called haciendas, and their owners
hadenderos. The tobacco industry is an important one, and
would be even if the export averaging half a million
cigars for every day in the year were stopped, for the Fili-
pinos themselves are inveterate smokers. The men smoke,
the women smoke, the children smoke — usually cigarettes,
but sometimes cigars of enormous proportions. "When I first
came here," Prof. C. M. Conner said to me, "it amused me to
ask a Filipino how far it was to a certain place, and have him
answer, 'Oh, two or three cigarettes,' meaning the distance a
man should walk in smoking two or three cigarettes ! " Cocoa-
nut-raising is a very profitable industry — all along the Pasig
River in Manila you can see the native boats high-packed
with the green, unhusked product, and two towns in Batan-
zas shipped 1500 carloads last year. It is also believed that
166 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
the rubber industry would pay handsomely. The rubber-
producing trees I saw about Manila were very promising.
Coffee plantations brought their owners handsome incomes
until about twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating
than the cotton boll weevil, came with destruction as swift
as that which befell Sennacherib. I heard the story of an
old plantation near Lipa, whose high-bred Castilian owner
once lived in splendor, his imported horses gay in harness made
of the finest silver, but the blight which ruined his coffee plants
was equally a blight to his fortunes and his home and it is now
given over to weeds and melancholy ruins. In some sections,
however, coffee is still grown successfully, and I was much
interested in seeing the shrubs in bearing.
The Philippines are about the only place I have found since
leaving home where the people are not trying to grow cotton.
In California, in the Hawaiian Islands, in Japan, in Korea,
and even in Manchuria as far north as Philadelphia, I have
found the plants, and of course in China proper. But I should
add just here, that in Southern China, about Canton, I did
not find cotton. As for the industry in the Philippines, a South-
ern man, now connected with the Agricultural Department in
Manila, said to me: "Cotton acts funny here. It runs to
weed. I planted some and it opened five or six bolls a stalk
and then quit: died down." He showed me some "tree cotton,"
about twenty feet high, and also some of the Caravonica cotton
from Australia, which is itself much like a small tree.
When it comes to the lumber industry, not even Col. Mul-
berry Sellers would be likely to overestimate the possibilities
the Philippines offer. There are literally millions in it. The
government is leasing immense areas on a stumpage royalty
of about 1 per cent., and as railways are built the industry
will expand. Fortunately, there are strict regulations to prevent
the destruction of the forests. They must be used, not wasted.
The authorities realize that while timber is a crop like other
crops, it differs from the other crops in that the harvesting must
THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 167
never be complete. The cutting of trees below a certain mini-
mum size is forbidden.
And now a word as to the activities of the American Govern-
ment in the islands and the agencies through which these
activities are conducted. The supreme governing body is
known as the Philippine Commission, consisting of the Gover-
nor-General, who is ex-officio president, and seven other mem-
bers (four Americans, three Filipinos) appointed by the Presi-
dent of the United States. Four of these commissioners (three
of these are Americans) are heads of departments, having
duties somewhat like those of Cabinet officers in America. This
commission is not only charged with the executive duties,
but it acts as the Upper House or Senate of the Philippine
Congress. That is to say, the voters elect an Assembly corre-
sponding to our House of Representatives, but no legisla-
tion can become effective unless approved by the Philippine
Commission acting as the Upper House. In the first two
elections, those of 1907 and 1909, the advocates of early in-
dependence, opponents of continued American supremacy,
have predominated. The result has been that the American
members of the commission have had to kill numberless bills
passed by the Assembly. On the other hand, some very
necessary and important measures advocated by the commis-
sion, measures which would be very helpful to the Filipinos,
are opposed by the Assembly either through ignorance or
stubbornness. Most of the Assembly members are of the
politician type, mestizos or half-breeds (partly Spanish or
Chinese), and very young. "In fact," a Manila man said to
me, "when adjournment is taken, it is hard for a passerby
to tell whether it is the Assembly that has let out or the High
School!" The people in the provinces elect their own gover-
nors and city officials.
In some respects the legislation for the Philippines adopted
by the American officials at Washington and Manila has been
quite progressive. To begin with, our Republican National
168 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Administration frankly recognized the blunders made in the
South during Reconstruction days, and has practically en-
dorsed the general policy of sufiFrage restriction which the
South has since adopted. When the question came up as to
who should be allowed to vote, even for the limited number of
elective offices, no American Congressman was heard to pro-
pose that there should be unrestricted manhood suffrage.
Instead, the law as passed provides that in order to vote in
the Philippines one must be 23 years of age, a subject of no
foreign power, and must either (1) have held some responsible
office before August 13, 1898, or (2) own $250 worth of prop-
erty or pay $15 annually in established taxes, or (3) be able
to speak, read, and write English or Spanish. Of course, the
Filipinos, with a few exceptions, do not "speak, read, or write"
English or Spanish; they have been taught only their own
dialect. I understand that only 2 per cent, of the people can
vote under these provisions.
It should be said just here, however, that the government
is now making a magnificent effort to educate all the Filipinos,
and the schools are taught in English. The fact that half a
million boys and girls had been put into public schools was the
first boasted achievement of the American administration of
the islands. It was, indeed, a great change from Spanish
methods, but in the last three or four years the officials have
been rapidly waking up to the fact that while they have been
getting the Filipinos into the schools, they have not been getting
them into the right sort of schools.
With the realization of this fact, a change has been made
in the kind of instruction given. More and more the schools
have been given an industrial turn. When I visited the
Department of Education in Manila I found that old text-
books had been discarded and new text-books prepared —
books especially suited to Philippine conditions and directed to
practical ends. Instead of a general physiology describing
bones, arteries, and nerve centres, I found a little book on
THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 169
"Sanitation and Hygiene in the Tropics," written in simple
language, profusely illustrated, and with information which the
pupil can use in bettering the health of himself, his family,
and his neighborhood. Instead of a general book on agricul-
ture, I found a book written so as to fit the special needs, crops,
and conditions in the Philippines. Moreover, I found the
officials exhibiting as their chief treasures the specimens of
work turned out by the pupils as a result of the practical in-
struction given them.
"I really think," said one of the officers, "that we have
carried the idea of industrial education, of making the schools
train for practical life, much farther in the Philippines than
it has been carried in the United States. The trouble at home
is that our teachers don't introduce industrial education early
enough. They wait until the boy enters the upper grades
— if he doesn't leave school before entering them at all, as he
probably does. In any case, they reach only a few pupils. Our
success, on the other hand, is due to the fact that we begin
with industrial education in the earlier grades and get every-
body."
And right here is a valuable lesson for those of us who are
interested in getting practical training for white boys and girls
in America as well as for brown boys and girls in the Philip-
pines.
Another progressive step was the introduction of postal
savings banks for the Filipinos before any law was passed
giving similar advantage to the white people of the United
States. The law has worked well. In fact, the increase in
number of depositors last year, from 8782 to 13,102 — nearly
50 per cent, in a single twelvemonth — would indicate that
the people are getting enthusiastic about it and that it is
achieving magnificent results in stimulating thrift and the
saving habit.
The government has also introduced the Torrens System
of Registering Land Titles, as it has done in Hawaii. Formerly
170 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
the farmer or the peasant paid 20 per cent, or more for advances
or loans. With his land registered under the Torrens system
the bank will lend him money at a normal rate of interest,
with nothing wasted in lawyers' fees for expensive investigations
of all previous changes in title since the beginning of time.
Judge Charles B. Elliott, now Secretary of Commerce and
Police for the islands, was on the Minnesota Supreme Bench
when the Torrens plan was put into force there, and he is
enthusiastic about its workings both in his home state in
America and in the Philippines.
For the public health an especially fruitful work has been
done by the Americans, albeit the Filipino has often had much
to say in criticism of the methods of saving life, and but little
in praise of the work itself. " The hate of those ye better,
the curse of those ye bless" may usually be confidently
counted on by those who bear the White Man's Burden,
and this seems to have been especially true with regard
to health work in the East. In the Philippines the farmers
object to the quarantine restrictions that would save their
carabao from rinderpest; they object to the regulations
that look to stamping out cholera, and I suppose the
isolation and colonization of lepers, who formerly ran at large,
has also been unpopular. In spite of opposition, vaccination
is now general; pock-marked Filipinos will not be so common
in future.
Nor is it likely that there will be many reports of cholera
outbreaks such as an ex-army nurse described to me a few days
ago: "When I was in Iloilo in 1902," she said, "it was im-
possible to dig graves for the poor natives as fast as they died.
The men were kept digging, at the point of the bayonet, all
night long — pits 100 feet long, 7 feet wide and 7 feet deep,
in which the bodies of the dead were thrown and quick-limed
— and yet I remember that on one occasion 235 corpses lay for
forty-eight hours before we could find graves for them."
In Manila statistics show that 44 per cent, of the deaths are
THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 171
of babies under one year old, and the ignorance of the mothers
as to proper methods of feeding and nursing has resulted in a
shockingly high death rate of little ones all over the Philippines.
I noticed that the new school text-book on sanitation and hy-
giene gives especial attention to the care of infants, and it is
said that already the school boys and girls are often able to
give their mothers helpful counsel. In this fact we have
another good suggestion for the school authorities at home,
where it is said that proper knowledge and care would save the
lives of a million infants a year.
Hardly less important than the school work has been the
road-building undertaken by the American officials. And in
Philippine road work a most excellent example has been set
for the states at home, in that the authorities have given atten-
tion not only to building roads but to maintaining them after
they are built. Too many American communities vote a heavy
bond issue for roads and think that ends the matter. In the
Philippines no such mistake has been made. "With the hea^7■
rains here," the Governor-General said to me, "our entire in-
vestment in a piece of good road would be lost in four years^
time if repair work were not carefully looked after."
The system adopted for keeping up the roads is very interest-
ing. Everywhere along the fine highways I travelled over
there were at intervals piles or pens of crushed stone and other
material for filling up any hole or break. For each mile or so a
Filipino is employed — he is called a caminero — and his whole
duty is to take a wheelbarrow and a few tools and keep that
piece of road in shape.
Prizes of $5000 each are also offered to the province that
maintains the best system of first-class roads, to the province
that spends the largest proportion of its funds on roads and
bridges, and to the province that shows the best and most
complete system of second-class roads.
That the Filipinos are unfit to face the world alone there
can be little doubt. As to whether it is our business in that
172 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
case to manage for them is another question. The Filipinos
are, like our negroes, a child-race in habits of thought, whatever
they may be from the standpoint of the evolutionist. "I
never get angry with them, however much they may obstruct
my plans," an American of rank said to me, "for I look on
them as children. We are running a George Junior Republic;
that's what it amounts to." Another American, who has had
some experience with the Assembly, said to me: "When you
have explained and reiterated some apparently simple proposi-
tion, they will come to you a day or so later with some element-
ary question amazing for its childishness." A large number of
excellent measures for which the Assembly has received the
credit were really instigated by the commission — "person-
ally conducted legislation," it is called.
The Filipinos come of a race which has achieved more than
the negro race, but on the whole they are probably hardly
better fitted for self-government than the negroes of the
South would be to-day if all the whites should move away.
As a Republican of some prominence at home said to me in
Manila: "A crowd of ten-year-old schoolboys in Chicago
would know better how to run a government."
The mere fact that the Filipinos are not capable of managing
wisely for themselves, of course, is not enough to justify a colo-
nial or imperialistic policy on the part of the United States.
It is not our business to go up and down the earth taking charge
of everybody who is not managing his affairs as well as we
think we could manage for him. But, in any case, there is
no use to delude ourselves as to what are the real qualifications
of Mr. Filipino.
I believe that the United States should eventually with-
draw from the islands, but when it does so there should be
an understanding with the Powers that will prevent the natives
from being exploited by some other nation.
China Sea, off Manila Harbor.
XVIII
ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA
[ HE prosperity of every man depends upon the pros-
perity (and therefore upon the efficiency) of the
Average Man.
So I have argued for years, in season and out
of season, in newspaper articles and in public addresses; and
the most impressive fact I have discovered in all my travel
through the Orient is the fundamental, world-wide importance
of this too little accepted economic doctrine. It is the biggest
lesson the Old World has for the New — the biggest and the
most important.
In America, education, democratic institutions, a proper
organization of industry: these have given the average
man a high degree of efficiency and therefore a high
degree of prosperity as compared with the lot of the aver-
age man in Asia or Europe — a prosperity heightened and
enhanced, it is true, by the exploitation of a new continent's
virgin resources, but, after all, due mainly, primarily, as we
have said, to the high degree of efficiency with which the
average man does his work.
And while there may be "too much Ego in our Cosmos,"
as Kipling's German said about the monkey, for us to like to
admit it, the plain truth is that, no matter what our business,
we chiefly owe our prosperity not to our own efforts, but to the
high standards of intelligence, efficiency, and prosperity on
the part of our people as a whole. We live in better homes, eat
more wholesome food, wear better clothing, have more leisure
173
174 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
and more recreation, endure less bitter toil; in short, we find
human life fairer and sweeter than our fellow man in Asia, not
because you or I as individuals deserve so much better than he,
but because of our richer racial heritage. We have been
born into a society where a higher level of prosperity obtains,
where a man's labor and effort count for more.
In China a member of the Emperor's Grand Council told
me that the average rate of wages throughout the empire for
all classes of labor is probably 18 cents a day. In Japan it
is probably not more, and in India much less. The best mill
workers I saw in Osaka average 22 cents a day; the laborers
at work on the new telephone line in Peking get 10 cents; wheel-
barrow coolies in Shanghai $4 a month; linotype operators in
Tokyo 45 cents a day, and pressmen 50; policemen 40; the iron-
workers in Hankow average about 10 cents; street-car con-
ductors in Seoul make 35 cents; farm laborers about Nankou
10 cents; the highest wages are paid in the Philippines, where
the ordinary laborer gets from 20 to 50 cents.*
*Since writing the foregoing I have looked up the latest official statistics for
Japan in the " Financial and Economic Annual for 1910," the latest figures
compiled to date being for 1908. In 1908 wages had increased on the whole
40 per cent, above 1900 figures, and I give herewith averages for certain classes
of workmen for 1899 and 1908:
Daily Wages in Cents
1899 1908
Farm laborer, male : $0. 13 $0.19
Farm laborer, female . S}4 H/^
Gardener .24 .34
Weaver, male .15 .22
Weaver, female .09 .12
Shoemaker 22j^ 32j^
Carpenter 25 .40
Blacksmith 23 .34
Day laborer .17 .26^
When I asked Director Matsui m hat he paid the hands I saw at work on the
Agricultural College farm, he answered, " Well, boiiig so near Tokyo, we have
to pay 30 to 40 sen (15 to 20 cents) a day, but in the country, generally, I should
say 20 to 35 sen" (10 to 13j^ cents a day).
ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 175
Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even
at these low figures; men work longer hours than in America,
and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness:
tasks such as an American laborer would regard as in-
human.
Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha.
He is doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and
for wages such as our Southern negroes would refuse for ordi-
nary labor. More than this, in most cases he is selling you not
only his time but his life-blood. Run he must with his human
burden, and faster than Americans would care to run without
a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his heart and
shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds of
weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver
in the winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure
and the overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw
man's life, I was told in Japan, is several years shorter than
that of the average man.
And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into
the rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which
it is not overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost
thought my life endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged,
and fought for the privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare
my patronage involved. In Hong Kong two runners, wild-
eyed with the keenness of the savage struggle for existence,
menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired as if they would
take me by force from his vehicle to their own — and this for
a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than feel
myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a
fellow being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in
Hankow, where not even the brutal clubbing of the policeman
was enough to keep the men in order. In wintry Newchwang I
think I suffered almost as much as my rickshaw man did merely
to see him wading through mud and foulness such as I should
not wish my horse to go through at home — though if he had
176 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used
to it!
I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls
the jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not
be crowded if it were not that the men find life in other lines
no better. Consider the men who carried me in my sedan
chair in Canton. As each man fitted the wooden shafts over
his shoulders I could see that they were welted with corns like
a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a sum-
mer's plowing.
Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who
do the work not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From
the time you land in Yokahoma your heart is made sick by
the sight of half-naked human-beings harnessed like oxen to
heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring
like slaves at the oar, they draw their heavy burdens through
the streets. One or two men wearily pull an immense tele-
graph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten
men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy
freight. Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy
building-stone or piece of machinery by running bamboo sup-
ports from the shoulders of the men behind to the shoulders
of the men in front: you can see the constant, tortuous play
of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while the
strained, monotonous, half -weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah!
Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain
from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock
work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by
human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus
is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel,
forever climbing and never advancing.
Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens
such as only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children
who should have the freedom that even the young colt gets
— how my heart has gone out to them cheated out of the joys
ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 177
of childhood ! And the women with children strapped on their
backs while they steer boats and handle passengers and traf-
fic about Hong Kong ! Or leave, if you will, the water-front at
Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep, bluff-like,
1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome residences
of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every mas-
sive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone
was carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain
of human muscle — and not merely human muscle, but in
most cases the muscles of women! Probably no governor in
any state in America lives in a residence so splendid as that
of the governor-general of Hong Kong — certainly no gover-
nor's residence is so beautifully situated, halfway up a sheer
mountain-slope — and yet the wife of the governor-general
told me that the material used in the building was brought
up the mountainside by women!
Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned
in a former letter the mills in Shanghai where women work
13| hours for 12 cents a day; and in most cases the women in
Eastern factories are herded together in crowded compounds
little better than the workhouses for American criminals!
Or consider the rice farmers who wade through mud knee-
deep to plant the rice by hand, cultivate it with primitive tools,
and harvest it with sickles. And after all this, they must often
sell the rice they grow, and themselves buy cheaper millet or
poorer rice for their own food. The situation has probably
improved somewhat since Col. Charles Denby published his
book five years ago, but in its general outlines the plight of
the typical Chinese farmer as described by him then is true
to-day:
"The average wage of an able-bodied young man is $12 per annum, with
food and lodging, straw shoes, and free shaving — an important item in a coun-
try where heads must be shaved three or four times a month. His clothing
costs about $4 per annmn. In ten years he may buy one third of an acre of
land ($150 per acre) and necessary implements. In ten years more he may
178 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
double his holdings and become part-owner in a water buffalo. In six years
more he can procure a wife and live comfortably on his estate. Thus in twenty-
six years he has gained a competence."
So much by way of a faint picture of existing industrial
conditions in the Orient. Let us now see what there is for us
to learn from these facts.
First of all, we may inquire why such conditions obtain.
Why is it that the Oriental gets such low wages, and has such
low earning power? "An overcrowded population," some-
body answers, "in China, for example, four hundred million
people — one fourth the human race — crowded within the
limits of one empire. This is the cause."
I don't believe it.
There is a limit no doubt beyond which increase of pop-
ulation, even with the most highly developed syjstem of in-
dustry, might lead to such a result, but I do not believe that
this limit has been reached even in China. The people in
England live a great deal better to-day than they did when
England had only one tenth its present population. The
average man in your county has more conveniences, comforts,
and a better income than he had in your grandfather's day
when the population was not nearly so dense. The United
States with a population of ninety odd million pays its laborers
vastly better than it did when its population was only thirty
million.
The truth is that every man should be able to earn a little
more than he consumes; there should be a margin, an excess
which should constitute his contribution to the "common-
wealth," to the race. Our buildings, roads, railroads, churches,
cathedrals, works of art — everything which makes the
modern world a better place to live in than the primitive world
was: these represent the combined contributions of all pre-
vious men and races. And if society is so able to handle men
that they produce any fraction more than they consume, the
more men the better the world.
ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 179
My conviction is that the Oriental nations are poor, not
because of their dense populations, but because of their defec-
tive industrial organizations, because they do not provide
men Tools and Knowledge to work with.
Ignorance and lack of machinery — these have kept Asia
poor; knowledge and modern tools — these have made America
rich.
If Asia had a Panama Canal to dig, she would dig it with
picks, hoes, and spades and tote out the earth in buckets.
Nothing but human bone and sinew would be employed, and
the men would be paid Httle, because without tools and knowl-
edge they must always earn little. But America puts brains,
science, steam, electricity, machinery into the Big Ditch — Tools
and Knowledge, in other words — and she pays good wages
because a man thus equipped does the work of ten men whose
only force is the force of muscle.
But Asia — deluded, foolish Asia — has scorned machinery.
"The more work machinery does, the less there will be for
human beings to do. Men will be without work, and men with-
out work will starve." With this folly on her lips she has re-
jected the agencies that would have rescued her from her never-
ending struggle with starvation.
Oftentimes, we know, the same cry has been heard in Eng-
land— and alas! even in America; our labor unions even now
sometimes lend a willing ear to such nonsense. There were
riots in England when manufacturers sought to introduce
labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and when railroads
were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands of
draymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared,
would have torn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers,
as the Chinese did along the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the
same feeling the old-time hand compositors looked upon the
coming of the typesetting machine.
And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of
draymen and cabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the
180 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
work of hundreds of thousands of weavers and spinners, with
all our telegraphs and telephones taking the place of number-
less messengers, runners, and errand boys, and with a pop-
ulation, too, vastly in excess of the population when old-
fashioned methods prevailed, the fact stands out that labor
has never been in greater demand and has never commanded
higher wages than to-day.
With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that
it must ever be so — certainly as far ahead as we can look into
the future. When a machine is invented which enables one
man to do the work it formerly required two men to do in pro-
ducing some sheer necessity for mankind, an extra man is
released or freed to serve mankind by the production of some
comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the things of the mind
and the spirit.
And it is the duty of society and government, it may be
said just here, to facilitate this result, to provide education and
equality of opportunity so that each man will work where his
effort will mean most in human service. Knowledge or educa-
tion not only cuts the shackles which chain a man down to a
few occupations, not only sets him free to labor where he can
work best, but is also itself a productive agency — a tool with
which a man may work better.
Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the
air: a man may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it
to work, and get results, profits, power, from it, as surely as
from a harnessed horse or steam engine. And so with every
other useful bit of knowledge under heaven. Knowledge is
power.
All this doctrine Asia has rejected, or has never even got to
the point of considering. In America a motorman or con-
ductor by means of tools and knowledge — a street-car for
a tool and the science of electricity for knowledge — transports
forty people from one place to another. These men are high-
priced laborers considered from an Oriental standpoint and yet
SOCIETY BELLES OF MINDANAO, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
WWW&T
A STREET SCENE IN MANILA
TWO KINDS OF WORKERS IN BURMA
One of the pleasures of being "on the road to Mandalay" was to see the —
"Elephints a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squd^y creek "
The elephants of Rangoon are as fascinating as the camels of Peking. But
one never gets hardened to the every-day Oriental spectacle of human beings
harnessed like oxen to weary burdens, many of which make those in the lower
picture look light by comparison
ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 183
it costs you only five cents for your ride, and five minutes'
time. In Peking, on the other hand, it takes forty men pulling
rickshaws to transport the forty passengers; and though the
pullers are "cheap laborers," it costs you more money and an
hour's time to get to your destination — even if you are so
lucky as not to be taken to the wrong place.
Forty men to do the work that two would do at home!
Men and women weavers doing work that machines would do
at home. Grain reaped with sickles instead of with horses
and reapers as in America. Sixteen men at Hankow to carry
baggage that one man and a one-horse dray would carry in
New York. Women carrying brick, stone, and timber up
the mountainside at Hong Kong — and the Chinese threat-
ened a general riot when the English built a cable-car system
up the incline; they compelled the owners to sign an agree-
ment to transport passengers only — never freight! No saw-
mills in the Orient, but thousands of men laboriously convert-
ing logs into lumber by means of whipsaws. No pumps, even
at the most used watering places, but buckets and ropes:
often no windlass. No power grain-mills, but men and women,
and, in some cases, asses and oxen, doing the work that the
idle water-powers are given no chance to do.
These are but specimen illustrations. In the few industries
where machinery and knowledge are brought into play ordinary
labor is as yet but little better paid than in other lines because
such industries are not numerous enough to affect the general
level of wages. The net result of her policy of refusing the help
of machinery is that Asia has not doubled a man's chances for
work, but she has more than halved the pay he gets for that
work. And why? Because she has reduced his efficiency.
A man must get his proportion of the common wealth, and
where the masses are shackled, hampered by ignorance and
poor tools, they produce little, and each man's share is little.
Suppose you are a merchant: what sort of trade could you
hope for among a people who earn 10 cents a day — the head
184 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKTNG UP
of a family getting half enough to buy a single meal in a
second-rate restaurant? Or if you are a banker, what sort of
deposits could you get among such a people? Or if a railroad
man, how much traffic? Or if a manufacturer, how much
business? Or if a newspaper man, how much circulation?
Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how much income?
Very plain on the whole must be my two propositions:
(1) That the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer
well-to-do, because the Asiatic earns little, the American
much — a condition due to the fact that the American doubles,
trebles, or quadruples his productive capacity, his earning
power, by the use of tools and knowledge, machinery and
education. The Oriental does not.
(2) Your prosperity, in whatever measure you have it;
the fact that your labor earns two, three, or ten times what
you would get for it if you had been born in Asia: this is due
in the main, not to your personal merit, but to your racial
inheritance, to the fact that you were born among a people
who have developed an industrial order, have provided edu-
cation and machinery, tools and knowledge, in such manner
that your services to society are worth several times as much as
would be the case if you were in the Orient, where education
has never reached the common people.
Pity — may God pity ! — the man who fancies he owes
nothing to the school, who pays his tax for education grudg-
ingly as if it were a charity — as if he had only himself to
thank for the property on which the government levies a
pitiable mill or so for the advancement and diffusion of knowl-
edge among mankind. Pity him if he has not considered;
pity him the more if, having considered, he is small enough of
soul to repudiate the debt he owes the race. But for what
education has brought us from all its past, but for what it
has wrought through the invention of better tools and the
better management (through increased knowledge) of all the
powers with which men labor, our close-fisted, short-sightad
ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 185
taxpayer would himself be living in a shelter of brush, shoot-
ing game with a bow and arrow, cultivating com with a crooked
stick! Most of what he has he owes to his racial heritage;
it is only because other men prosper that he prospers. And
yet owing so much to the Past, he would do nothing for the
Future; owing so much to the progress the race has made, he
would do nothing to insure a continuance of that progress.
"Line upon line; precept upon precept." At the risk of
possible redundancy, therefore, let me conclude by repeating:
Whatever prosperity you enjoy is largely due to what pre-
vious generations have done for increasing man's efficiency
by means of knowledge and tools; your first duty to your
fellows is to help forward the same agencies for human uplift
in the future. And while this is the first duty of the individual,
it is even more emphatically the first duty of a community
or a commonwealth.
This is Asia's most important lesson for America.
Singapore, Straits Settlements.
XIX
THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA
THE Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in
the dead of winter, and yet with no suggestion of
snow, bare fields, or leafless trees. The luxuriant
green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and
in Singapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator,
summer and winter are practically ahke.
"But you must remember that we are here in the winter-
time," a fellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed
his surprise at not finding it hotter than it really was — the
speaker evidently forgetting that at the equator December is
as much a summer month as July, and immediately south
of it what are the hot months with us become the winter
months there. And Singapore is so close to the equator that
for it "all seasons are summer," and the punkah wallas (the
coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are made
tolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the
Fourth of July.
The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers
on the tropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoa-
nut palms are silhouetted against the sky in all directions;
the dense, heavy foliage of the banana trees is seen on almost
every street; the sprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion
of roots and branches, casts its dense shadows on the grateful
earth; and all around the city are rubber plantations, immense
pineapple fields, and uncleared jungle-land in which wild
beasts and poisonous serpents carry on the unending life-and-
186
STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 187
death struggle between the strong and the weak. Singapore,
in fact, is said to have been called "the Lion City" for a long
while because of the great number of lions found in the neigh-
borhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed near-
by, and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long.
There is probably no place on earth in which there have
been brought together greater varieties of the human species
than in Singapore. I was told that sixty languages are spoken
in the city, and if diversity of color may be taken as an indica-
tion of diversity of language, I am prepared to believe it.
There are many Indians or Hindus, most of them about as
black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasian
in the main — sharp noses, thin lips, and straight glossy black
hair; but 72 per cent, of the population of Singapore is
Chinese.
It is interesting to observe that John Chinaman seems to
flourish equally in the Tropics and in the Temperate Zone.
Here in Singapore under an equatorial sun, or in Canton on
the edge of the Tropics, he seems as energetic, as unfailing in
industry, as he is in wintry Mukden or northern Mongolia.
For hours after sunset many of the Chinese shops in Singapore
present as busy an appearance as at mid-day, and the pig-
tailed rickshaw men, with only a loin-cloth about their bare
bodies, seem to run as fast and as far as they would if they
were in Peking.
The Chinese are a wonderful people, and I am more and
more impressed with the thought of what a hand they are to
have in the world's affairs a hundred years hence when they
get thoroughly "waked up." They were first brought to
Singapore, I understand, as common laborers, but now their
descendants are among the wealthiest men and women in the
place and ride around in automobiles, while descendants of
their one-time employers walk humbly on the adjacent side-
walks. It is a tribute to the untiring industry, shrewdness, and
business skill of the Chinaman that nowadays when people
188 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
anywhere speak of desiring Celestials as laborers, they add,
"Provided they are under contract to return to China when
the work is finished, and do not remain to absorb the trade
and wealth of the country."
From Singapore we made a very interesting trip to Johore,
a little kingdom about the size of ten ordinary counties, and
with a population of about 350,000. The soil and climate
along the route are well suited to the cultivation of rubber
trees, and considerable areas have recently been cleared of the
dense jungle growth and set to young rubber plants. One of
my friends who has a rubber plantation north of Singapore
says that while rubber is selling now at only $1.50 a pound as
compared with $3 a pound a few months ago, there are still
enormous profits in the business, as the rubber should not
cost over 25 cents a pound to produce. Some of the older
plantations paid dividends of 150 per cent, last year, and prob-
ably set aside something for a rainy day in addition.
Yet not even these facts would have justified the wild spec-
ulation in rubber, the unreasoning inflation in values, which
proved a veritable "Mississippi Bubble" for so many investors
in Europe and Asia last year. Shares worth $5 or $10 were
grabbed by eager buyers at $100 each. I know of a specific
instance where a plantation bought for $16,000 was capi-
talized at $230,000, or 20 for 1, and the stock floated. When
the madness had finally spent itself and people began to see
things as they were, not only individuals, but whole commun-
ities, found themselves prostrated. Shanghai will not recover
for years, and some of its citizens — the young fellow with a
$1500 income who incurred a $30,000 debt in the scramble,
for example — are left in practical bondage for life as a result.
The men who have gone into the rubber-growing industry on
a strictly business basis, however, are likely to find it profit-
able for a long time to come.
The cocoanut industry is also a profitable one, although
the modest average of 10 per cent., year in and year out, has
STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 189
not appealed to those who have been indulging in pipe dreams
about rubber. Where transportation facilities are good, the
profits from cocoanuts probably average considerably in excess
of 10 per cent., for the trees require little care, and it is easy
for the owners to sell the product without going to any trouble
themselves. In one section of the Philippines, I know, the
Chinese pay one peso (50 cents gold) a tree for the nuts and
pick them themselves. And when we consider the great
nmnber of the slim-bodied trees that may grow upon an acre,
it is not surprising to hear that many owners of cocoanut
groves or plantations live in Europe on the income from the
groves, going to no trouble whatever except to have the trees
counted once a year.
Penang, where we spent only a day, is almost literally in
the midst of an immense cocoanut plantation, and I was much
interested in seeing the half-naked Hindus gathering the
unhusked fruit for shipment. The tall, limbless trunks of
the trees, surmounted only by a top-knot of fruit and foliage,
are in nearly every case gapped and notched at intervals of
about three feet to furnish toe-hold for the natives in climbing.
After tiiEBn on this winter day, instead of putting on gloves
and overcoats, we went out on a grassy lawn, clad in linen and
pongee as we were, and luxuriated in the cool shade of the palm
trees. The dense foliage of the tropical jungle was in sight
from our place by the seaside, and in the garden not far away
were cinnamon trees, cloves, orchids, rubber trees, the poi-
sonous upas, and palms of all varieties known.
Penang is a rather important commercial centre, and ex-
ports more tin than any other place on earth. The metal is
shipped in molten bars like lead or pig iron, and to one who has
associated tin only with light buckets, cups, and dippers, it
is surprising how much strength it takes to move a bar of the
solid metal the size of a small watermelon.
The imports of Penang are also not inconsiderable, and in
walking through the warehouses along the wharves I was
190 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
struck by the number of boxes, crates, bales, and bundles bear-
ing the legend, "Made in Germany." The Germans are to-
day the most aggressive commercial nation on earth, and
I find that their government and their business houses are
searching every nook and corner of the globe for trade openings.
Unlike our American manufacturers, it may be observed just
here, they are quick to change the style of their goods to meet
even what they may regard as the whims of their customers,
and this is an advantage of no small importance. If a manu-
facturer wishes to sell plows in the Philippines, for example,
it would not be worth while for him to try to sell the thor-
oughly modem two-handled American kind to begin with.
He should manufacture an improved one-handled sort at first
and try gradually to make the natives see the advantages of
using two handles. At present, as an American said to me in
Manila, if you should seek to sell a Filipino a two-handled
plow he would probably say that two handles may be all
right for Americans who are not expert at plowing, but that
the Filipino has passed that stage!
I mention this only by way of illustrating the necessity of
respecting the custombrey or custom, of the country. The
Germans realize this, and we do not.
One day by steamer from Penang brought us to Rangoon,
the capital and most important city in Burma, and (next to
Bombay and Calcutta) the most important in British India.
We had heard much of the place, situated thirty miles up the
river "on the road to Mandalay," but found that even then
the half had not been told. If there were nothing else to see
but the people on the streets, a visit to Rangoon would be
memorable, for nowhere else on earth perhaps is there such
butterfly-like gorgeousness and gaudiness of raiment. At a
little distance you might mistake a crowd for an enormous
flower-bed. All around you are men and women wearing
robes that rival in brilliancy Joseph's coat of many colors.
The varieties in form of clothing are as great as the varieties
STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 191
in hue. The Burmese babies toddle about in beauty unadorned,
and for the grown-ups there is every conceivable sort of ap-
parel — or the lack of it. Most of the laborers on the streets
wear only a loin-cloth and a turban (with the addition of a
caste-mark on the forehead in case they are Hindus), but
others have loose-fitting red, green, yellow, blue, striped,
ring-streaked or rainbow-hued wraps, robes, shirts or trousers:
and the women, of course, affect an equal variety of colors.
"The whackin' white cheroot" that the girl smoked in Kip-
ling's "Road to Mandalay" is also much in evidence here; or
perhaps instead of the white cheroot it is an enormous black
cigar. In either case it is as large as a medium-sized corncob,
that the newly landed tourist is moved to stare thereat in
open-eyed amazement. How do Kipling's verses go?
" 'Er petticoat was yaller, an' 'er little cap was green.
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot.
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot."
They are all there in Rangoon yet — the gorgeous coloring
of the lady's raiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols —
"Bloomin' idol made o' mud.
Wot they called the Great Gawd Bud."
How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would
be impossible to estimate — I saw them not only in the pagodas,
but newly carved in the shops which supply the Buddhist
temples in the interior — and the gilded dome of the Shwe
Dagon Pagoda, "the most celebrated shrine of the entire
Buddhist world," glitters like a beacon for miles before you
reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the Washing-
ton Monument, it is gilded from top to bottom — with actual
gold leaf, Rangoon citizens claim — and around it are innu-
merable smaller pagodas and shrines glittering with mosaics
of colored glass in imitation of all the gems known to mortals.
192 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Studied closely, they appear unduly gaudy, of course, but
your first impression is that you have found a real Aladdin's
palace, a dazzling, glittering dream of Oriental splendor and
magnificence. To these shrines there come to-day, as there
have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims
from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pil-
grims not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China,
and Korea. I shall not soon forget the feeble looks of the old
white-haired pilgrim whom two women were helping up the
steep ascent as I left the Pagoda after my second visit there.
I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all the millions to
whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia," that it is a
religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies
of Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about
the Shwe Dagon present at least some faint idea of a God who
tempers justice with mercy and made human life good rather
than a God of cruelty who made life a curse and a mockery.
Every traveller who sees Buddhist Burma after having seen
Hindu India comments on the greater cheerfulness and hope-
fulness of the Burman people, and especially the happier lives
of the women — all a result, in the main, of the difference
in religion.
And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable
enough — its temples infested by fortune-tellers, witches,
and fakirs, its faith mingled with gross superstitions and charms
to propitiate the "nats" or spirits which are supposed to in-
habit streams, forests, villages, houses, etc., and to have in-
finite power over the lives and fortunes of the people. A
common sight on the morning streets is a group of yellow-robed
priests with their begging bowls, into which pious Buddhists
put food and other offerings; without these voluntary offer-
ings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma,
as in Siam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a
few days and get his living in this way.
The ordinary beast of burden in Rangoon is the Indian bul'*
STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 198
lock. Often pure white, usually with a well-kept appearance
and with a clean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he
should be on the way to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about
his head. Teams of black Hindus, three quarters naked,
are also seen pulling heavy carts and drays; and it may be that
the small boys utilize the long-eared goats (they have heavy,
drooping ears like a foxhound's) to pull their small carts,
but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city that
interested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the ele-
phants of Rangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of
Peking in my memory and affection. Of course, the elephants
of Rangoon are not so numerous as are the camels in China's
capital, but those that one sees display an intelligence and
certain human-like qualities that make them fascinating.
One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co.'s
lumber yard at Ahloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained
elephants there handle the heavy saw-logs which it is neces-
sary to move from place to place. It was better than a
circus.
" Elephants a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek."
It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other
beings in the Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work.
What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with
infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between
tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long
and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the
mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down
on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage,
and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he
"cussed" in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a
magnificent tusker, pushed the logs with his snout and tusks,
while the others pulled them with chains. But the most
marvellous thing is how the barefooted, half -naked driver, or
mahout, astride the great giant's shoulders, makes him under-
194 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
stand what to do in each case by merely kicking his neck or
prodding his ears.
At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna
got his log stuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring pro-
fanely about his trials, when the tusker's mahout bid that
royal beast go help his troubled brother. Straightway, there-
fore, went the tusker, leaving great holes in the mud at each
footprint as if a tree had been uprooted there, gave a mighty
shove to the recalcitrant log, and there was peace again in
the camp.
For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any
ordinary sized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if
it were a piece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in
piling heavy plank he is remarkably careful about matching.
Eying the pile at a distance, he looks to see if it is uneven or
any single piece out of place, in which case he is quick to make
it right. The young lady in our party was also much amused
when the mahout called out, "Salaam to memsahib" ("Salute
the lady"), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation as
gracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit.
One of my fellow-passengers, a rubber planter from the
Straits Settlements, has worked elephants, has used them on
the plantation and as help in building bridges, and has told me
some interesting stories concerning them. He had two —
one a tusker worth 2500 rupees, or $833 1-3, and the other a
mutna (without tusks) worth 2250 rupees, or $750. On one
occasion the mutna heard "the call of the wild," and went
back to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren
didn't like the civilized ways he brought back with him, for
when he returned home later two thirds of his tail had been
pulled off, and he bore other marks of struggle on his body.
The tusker on one occasion ran mad (as they will do now and
then) and killed one of his keepers.
I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is
caught. Driven into a stockade, the tamed elephants close in
STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 195
on hinij and the mahouts get him well chained before he
knows what has happened. For a day or two he remains
in enforced bondage, then two or three of the great tamed
creatures take him out for a walk or down to the river where
he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts
set about taming him — talk to him in the affectionate, sooth-
ing, half hypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in
his stories, and stroke his trunk from discreet but gradually
lessening distances. In a couple of months "my lord the
Elephant" is fully civilised, responds promptly to the sug-
gestions of his mahout, and a httle later adopts some useful
occiipation.
In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the im-
mense rafts of teak trees that are floated down the rivers for
export. My friend the rubber planter has also had one or two
good travelling elephants on which he used to travel through
the jungle from one plantation to the other, a distance of
twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion he has run
into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On good
roads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make
seven miles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which,
however, they are likely to lose if set to heavy work.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the
great quantity of food required to keep him going. Eight
hundred pounds a day will barely "jestify his stummuck,"
as Uncle Remus would say, and when he gets hungry "he
wants what he wants when he wants it," and trumpets thun-
derously till he gets it. The skipper on a Singapore-Rangoon
steamer told of having had a dozen or more on board a few
months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they
waxed mutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear
the whole vessel to pieces, when the ship fortunately came near
enough to land to enable the officers to signal for a few tons
of feed to be brought aboard for the elephants' breakfast.
I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon
196 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an or-
phan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast
as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-
guide in question assured me that he will turn white by the
time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interest-
ing if true, but I fear it isn't.
I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude
my impression of Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the
lighter-skinned and lighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather
notably with the dark and serious Hindus. Many of the Hin-
dus are in Burma only temporarily. One ship that I saw com-
ing into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India, was liter-
ally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They will
work through the Burman rice harvest — rice is the one great
crop of the country — at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents)
a day, and after three or four months of this will return home.
Because they are so poor at home the steamship charges only
ten rupees ($3) for bringing them to Rangoon, but requires
fifteen rupees for carrying them back.
Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed
me very much in Rangoon: the graves of the English officers
who were killed in the war with the Burmans many years ago,
and are now buried within the walls of the picturesque old
Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sun never sets on the
English flag; and one finds much to remind him, too, that the sun
never sets on the graves of that flag's defenders. Scattered
through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands
of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Near-
by the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on
the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the
tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River
breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And
then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone — more
refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate ever
knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how
STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 197
it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whis-
pered among the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great
blades of the bananas welcomed it!
With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if
of Araby the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our
leave of Burma.
Rangoon, Burma.
XX
HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS
P IT were any other country but India, I might write last
of the religion the people profess, but, since it is
India, it is the first thing to be considered. Religion is
the supreme fact of Indian life — if we may call
religion what has been more properly defined as "a sacred
disease."
Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where
the entire life of the people is so molded by their spiritual
beliefs. Two children are born the same day. The one, of
high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed
shall be all his life, no matter how stupid or vicious, a privi-
leged and "superior" being, to whom all lower orders must
make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and mother,
Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how
great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere
touch works pollution worse than crime. And through the
lifetime of each, Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme
religion of India is called, will exercise over him an influence
more potent and incessant than any civil government has ever
exercised over its subjects.
About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admit-
tedly a certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this
from Hindu literature one must wade through cesspools of filth
and obscenity and must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of
Deity, while in its practical manifestations modem Hinduism is
the most sickening combination of superstition, idolatry, and
198
HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 199
vice that now disgraces the name of religion in any considerable
portion of the earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls,
"Samsara," the belief that you have had millions of births
(as men and animals) and may have millions more (unless you
earlier merit the favor of the gods and win release from life),
and that what you are in your present life is the result of actions
in previous existence, and what you do in this present existence
will influence all your future rebirths — this is a doctrine that
might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with such
ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical Hin-
duism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on
exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor,
but on rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid ob-
servance of caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper
sacrifices to fickle or bloodthirsty gods and goddesses. In
their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest
against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that God
can be worshipped only in spirit.
Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an
Emanation of God, a part of the Divine Essence, and the
purpose of man's existence to hasten a final absorption into
God -^ this also (although destructive of the idea of individ-
uality, the sacredness of personality, so fundamental in Chris-
tian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral force,
but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Sam-
sara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu
gods themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty,
obscene and criminal.
Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its phi-
losophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the
Higher Hinduism "powerless to be born," is only the illusion
which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism
hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands
of the sea for multitude. If all the human race alive to-day
were to pass in review before you, every eighth person in the
200 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hin-
duism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to
visit some of their most celebrated temples.
It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the
first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat
in Calcutta. This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother
Kali," as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted
me always said, the bloody goddess of destruction. That ter-
rible society of criminals and assassins, the Thugs (its founder
is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron goddess and
whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before
her image: all this in a "temple" of "religion."
The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is
in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue
lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping,
bloody head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the
heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead
men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and
each man who comes to worship her brings a little wet, trembling
kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done
its work is supposed to please the terrible goddess. The morn-
ing of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on
the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place runs ankle-
deep in blood.
In the old days — and not so long ago at that — there were
human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest
concerning them, his significant answer was that the British
Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim
that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kalihi Purana says
that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years,
and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head bedecked
with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many
years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice
has been attempted within a decade.
From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me
HINDUISM— AND THE HIMALAYAS 201
to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the
Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable
pilgrims were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit"
with the gods. On the way we passed the image of Jugger-
naut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims
are lodged, and the image of Setola, "the Mother of the Small-
pox," as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come
for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest assured me that
if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth
2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking,
bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers"
and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming
— and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to
lend his assistance — there ensued such a Kilkenny fight be-
tween the priests and the dense mob of "worshippers," such
knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for
the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I
got a swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.
Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest
(like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for
"more") I went back to my hotel, properly edified, let us
believe, by this spectacle of Hindu "religion."
It was Sunday morning.
Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went
that afternoon to another Indian religious service — this time
of Christians — and compared it with what I had seen in the
morning? Instead of a money -hunting priest sitting beside
a butcher's block and exacting a prescribed fee from each
pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty goddess, her-
self only one of the many jealous gods and goddesses to be
favored and propitiated — instead of this there was a converted
Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whose charac-
teristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. And instead
of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the fine
rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily rec-
202 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
ognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words
into the strange tongue of the Bengali.
At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being
flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observ-
ant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through
Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is
the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as
compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in
Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives even of
those of
"Deaf ear and soul uncaring"
who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no
desire to preach, I set down these things, simply because they
are as obvious as temples or scenery to any Oriental traveller
who travels with open eyes and open mind.
But let us now go to Benares, the fountain-head of the Hindu
faith, the city which is to it what Mecca is to Mohammedanism
and more than Jerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares
is so important that I must give more than a aragraph to
my impressions of it.
The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I found
surprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many-
storied pilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious
to win the favor of the gods, tower like mountains from the
river bank. A strange mingling of many styles and epochs
of Oriental architecture are they, and yet mainly suggestive of
the palaces and temples that lined the ancient Nile. An earth-
quake, too, has heightened the effect by leaving massive ruins,
the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem to whisper
tales even older than any building now standing in Benares.
For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was
old when the walls of Rome were built; it was historic when
David sat on the throne of Israel.
But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly
HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 203
unlike these beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth
may one see crowds like these — crowds that overflow the
acres and acres of stone steps leading up from the river's edge
through the maze of buildings and spill off into the water.
There are indeed all sorts and conditions of men and women.
Princes come from afar with their gorgeous retinues and stately
equipages, and go down into the bathing-places calling on the
names of their gods as trustingly as the poor doomed leper who
thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring the hoped-
for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose
faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own house-
holds— they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to
be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained,
man-borne palki and are taken within boats with closed sides,
where they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and
women, old and young, high and low (except the outcasts)
— all come. There are once-brown Hindus with their skins
turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with limbs swollen
to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men
and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or
that impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which
is the nearest Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by
dying in the sacred place.
A great many pilgrims — may God have pity, as He will,
on their poor untutored souls — die in despair, worn out by
weakness and disease, ere they reach Benares with its Balm of
Gilead which they seek; but many other aged or afflicted ones
die happier for the knowledge that they have reached their
Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick work of the
morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the
Ganges. "Rama, nama, satya hai" (The name of Rama is true) :
so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid
red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are
used. The body is wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a
woman's, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before break-
204 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
fast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body has
converted into a handful of ashes that which was a breathing
human being when the sun set the day before.
Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief
that accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners
are sometimes hired — for one anna a Hindu can get a pro-
fessional mourner to wail heart-breakingly at the funeral of
his least-loved mother-in-law — but somehow the relatives of
the dead themselves seem to show little evidence of grief.
"But where are the bereaved families.'*" I asked a Hindu priest
as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and
talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor
of burning human flesh. "Oh, those are the families you see
there," he replied. And sure enough they were — I suppose
— although I had thought them only the persons hired to
help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the funerals
occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the
cremation is concluded it is the son's duty — in some places
I visited, at least — to take a big stick and crack the skull
in order to release his father's spirit!
But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why
should the Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his
theology, is itself a curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul
running its course through the bodies of beasts and men, the
ultimate good, the greatest boon to be won from the propiti-
ated gods, is "remerging in the general soul," the Escape from
Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and Self; not An-
nihilation itself but the Anniliilation of Personality, of that
sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement
in human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that
you are a son of God and that you will maintain a separate,
conscious, responsible identity throughout eternity, Hinduism
teaches that your spirit is a part of the Divine and will ulti-
mately be reabsorbed into it. Its doctrine in this respect is
much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably neither religion
TYPES AT DARJEELING, NORTHERN INDIA, AND AT DELHI,
CENTRAL INDIA
India has not a homogeneous population. There are almost as many races,
types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The right-hand figure in the
upper picture bears a striking resemblance to a North American Indian.
The instrument in his hands is a praying-wheel
TWO RANGOON TiPi^s
Swpi-yaw-lat and her " ivhackin' ichite A Hindu girl
cheroot "
Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one iie<.'J
not go far to find the Burmese girl KipHng has immortalized:
"'Er petticoat was yaller and "er little cap was green,
An er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen —
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cherout.
An' a wastin' Christian kisses on a "eathen idols foot'"
HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 207
lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of the indi-
vidual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian civili-
zation, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic
of the social and political institutions of the Orient.
But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do
not all die, nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred
waters of "Mother Gunga," as the Ganges is called. Naturally
there are many temples in which they must worship, many
priests whom they must support. There are said to be 2000
temples in Benares and the high priest of one of them — while
sparring for a bigger tip for his services — told me that he was
at the head of 400 priests supported by his establishment
alone (the Golden Temple).
And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side
of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and ob-
sceneness there are "temples" in Benares — so-called "temples"
that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called
"priests" to act as guides to their foulness — that could give
lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the
Government of India, when it made a law against indecent
pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for
Hindu " religious "(!) pictures. There is a limit, however,
even to the endurance of the British Government, and at the
Nepalese Temple I was told that the authorities do not allow
such structures to be built now. Moreover, it is not only
admitted that the temples in many parts of India are the
resort of the lowest class of women, "temple girls" dedicated
to gods and goddesses, but their oresence is openly defended
as proper.
Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanli-
ness as they are from godliness. The Golden Temple with
its sacred cows penned up in dirty stalls, its ragged half -naked
worshippers, its holy cesspool known as "The Well of Knowl-
edge," its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous em-
blems of its lustful god Krishna, and its mercenary priests,
^08 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
is a good illustration. And the famous Monkey Temple
(dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more
attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loath-
some collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the mis-
fortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the
monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on
the ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips,
won a place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their
monkey companions. I left and went out to the gate where
the snake-charmers were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras.
It was pleasanter to look at them.
That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares,
discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of
Hindu religious theory, but what I had seen during the day
did not help his argument. Emerson's phrase jnay well be
applied to Hinduism, "What you are speaks so loud that
I cannot hear what you say."
Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply
to get a better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in
conclusion to a happier subject. Some days ago I went to
Darjeeling on the boundary of northern India and on the edge
of the great Himalaya mountain range. In sight from its
streets and from nearby peaks are the highest mountains formed
by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on which the
eye of mortal man may ever rest.
Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed
horse and wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends
on a foreign tour are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill,
from which point we looked across the boundaries of Tibet
and saw the sun rise upon a view whose majesty defied descrip-
tion. In the distance on our left there glittered in its mantle
of everlasting snow, and with its twin attendants, the summit of
Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest mountain on the
surface of the earth. Even grander was the view directly in
front of us, for there only one third as far away as Everest, royal
HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 209
Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite
masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread
majesty toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad
semicircle of kingly peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet
risen to our view, colored the pure-white of its crest with
a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or two had se
the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues
of its earliest rays. Across forty -five miles of massive
chasms and rugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves
perhaps as high as the highest Alps or Rockies) we looked
to where, thousands of feet higher yet, there began the
eternal snow-line of Xinchinjunga, above which its further
bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling silhouette
against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak
and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the
foot of Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitch-
ells on top* of one another above its highest point — the mas-
sive bulk in either case stretching thousands and thousands of
feet above the line of everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga.
Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a
view it was not meet for any but the high gods themselves to
see. About it all was a suggestion of illimitableness, of more
than earthly majesty, of infinite serenity and measureless
calm, which sat upon our spirits with a certain eerie unworldli-
ness.
It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I
learned later that it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama
Buddha dreamed his dream of the Nirvana and of its brooding
and endless peace in which man's fretful spirit —
"From too much love of living
Brom hope and fear set free" —
may find at last the rest that it has sought in vain through
all our human realm of Time and Place.
Lucknow, India.
XXI
"THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS"
REAT indeed are the uses of Poetry. Consider by way
of illustration how accurately and comprehensively
some forgotten bard in four short lines has pictured
for us the true condition of the inhabitants of
England's great Indian Empire:
" The poor, benighted Hindu,
He does the best he kin do
He sticks to his caste from first to last.
And for pants he makes his skin do."
A Mr. Micawber might dilate at length upon how this achieve-
ment in verse informs us (1) as to the financial condition of
the people, to wit, they are "poor," the average annual income
having been estimated at only $10, and the average wages for
day labor in the capital city of India only 6 to 20 cents per
diem; (2) as to their intellectual condition, "benighted,"
ninety men in each hundred being unable to read or write any
language, while of every thousand Indian women 993 are to-
tally illiterate; (3) as to the social system, each man living and
dying within the limits of the caste into which he is born; and
(4) as to the clothing, garb or dress of the inhabitants (or the
absence thereof), the children of both sexes being frequently
attired after the manner of our revered First Parents before they
made the acquaintance of the fig tree, while the adults also
dispense generally with trousers, shoes, and stockings, and
other impedimenta of our over-developed civilization.
210
**THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" 211
Great indeed are the uses of poetry. In all my letters from
India I shall hardly be able to do more than expand and enlarge
upon the great fundamental truths so eloquently set forth in
our four-line poetry piece.
If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the
common people because he made so many of them," then the
Creator must also have a special fondness for these "poor
benighted Hindus/' for within an area less than half the
size of the United States more than 300,000,000 of them live
and move and have their being. That is to say, if the United
States were as thickly populated as India, it would contain
600,000,000 people. It is also said that when the far-flung
battle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expan-
sion that great empire had within its borders only half as many
people as there are in India to-day. India and its next-door
neighbor, China, contain half the population of the whole
earth. In other words, if the Chinese and East Indians were
the equals of the other races in military prowess the combined
armies of all other nations on the globe, of every nation in
Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Australia,
the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would be required
to defeat them.
Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family
calls for special study. And if we would study them we must
not confine ourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India,
interesting as these cities are.
The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of
the people live on the soil) is not the trader, a city -dweller in
these few large centres of population, but the ryot, or farmer,
in the thousands and thousands of little mud-house villages
between the Himalaya slopes and Cape Comorin. The signifi-
cant economic fact in India is not the millions of dollars once
spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30 spent in building this
average peasant's home or hut. The significant social fact is
not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modern Rajah
212 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
©stimated in lakhs of rupees^ but the five or six cents a day
which is a laborer's wage for millions and millions of the people.
For these reasons I have been no more interested in the
famous cities I have seen than in the little rural villages whose
names may have never found place in an English book. Let
us get, if we can, a pen picture of one of these villages in north
central India.
As I approached it from a distance it looked Hke an enormous
mass of ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as
has been suggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and
are often roofed with clay also — made flat on top with a little
trench or gutter for drainage. Perhaps the majority, however,
have thick sloping roofs of straw, the eaves being hardly as
high as a man's head. Very thick are the mud walls of the
houses, eighteen inches or more in most cases, and as the floor
is also the bare earth, there is no woodwork about such a dwell-
ing except the doors and a few poles to hold up the roof. In
one or two small rooms of this kind without a window or chim-
ney (oftener perhaps in one room than in two) a whole family
lives, cooks, and sleeps.
The streets, if such they may be called, are often little more
than crooked water-rutted paths, so narrow that one may reach
from the mud walls of the houses on one side to the mud walls
on the other, and so crooked that you are likely to meet your-
self coming back before you get to the end. Or perhaps you
wind up unexpectedly in some mahullah — a group of huts
representing several families of kinsfolk. Enclosed by a mud
wall, the little brown bright-eyed, black-haired, half-naked
children are playing together in the little opening around which
the houses are bunched, and the barefooted mothers are cooking
chapaiis, spinning cotton on knee-high spinning wheels, weaving
in some wonderfully primitive way, gathering fuel, or are en-
gaged in other household tasks. The equipment of one of
these human ant-hills, called a home, is about as primitive as
the building itself. There is, of course, a bed or cot: it is about
A HINDU FAQUIR
SOME FASHIONABLE HINDUS
The faquirs do not like to be photographed, and this fellow in the upper
picture was snapped just in the act of rising from his bed of spikes. This is
only one of many methods of self-torture practised in the hope of winning
the favor of the gods
HINDU CHILDREN — NOTICE THE FOREHEAD CASTE MARKS
"THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" 215
half knee-high, and the heavy twine or light rope knitted to-
gether after the fashion of a very coarse fish-net is the only
mattress. The coarse grain which serves for food is stored in
jars; the meagre supply of clothing hangs in one corner of the
room; there are no chairs, knives or forks. The stove or fire-
place is a sort of small clay box for the fire, with an opening
on top for the kettle or oven. In one corner of the room is
the fuel: a few small sticks and dried refuse from cow stalls
that Americans use for fertilizing their fields. "We have
found rather bad results," a missionary told me, "from provid-
ing Indian girls with mattresses, chairs, knives, forks, etc., at our
mission schools. Later, when they marry our native workers,
the $5-a-month income of the family (which is about all they
can expect) is insufficient to provide these luxuries, and the
girl's recollections of former comforts are likely to prove a
source of dissatisfaction to her."
At first you ask, "But why are there no windows in the
houses? Surely the people could leave openings in the clay walls
that would give light and ventilation .f*" The answer is that
most of the year the weather is so hot that the hope of the owner
is to get as nearly cave-like conditions as possible; to find, as
it were, a cool place in the earth, untouched by the fiery glare
of the burning sun outside. Even in north central India in
the houses of the white men, where everything has been done to
reduce the temperature and with every punkah-fan swinging
the room's length to make a breeze, the temperature in May and
June is 106 or higher, and at midnight in the open air the ther-
mometer may reach 105. "It is then no uncommon thing,"
a friend in Agra told me, " to find even natives struck down dead
by the roadside; and the railways have men designated to take
and burn the bodies of those who succumb to the heat in travel
by the cars."
In such a warm climate the dress of the people, as has already
been suggested, is not very elaborate. In fact, the garb of
the adult man is likely to be somewhat like the uniform of the
216 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Gunga Din (the Indian bhisti or water-carrier for the British
regiment) :
" The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'md —
For a twisty piece o' rag
And a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field equipment 'e could find."
In cold weather, however, the majority of the men are rather
fully covered, and in any case they add a turban or cap of
some gaudy hue to the uniform just suggested.
As for the dress of the women, a typical woman's outfit
will consist of, say, a crimson skirt with a green border, a navy-
blue piece of cloth as large as a sheet draped loosely (and quite
incompletely) around the head and upper part of the body,
and a breast-cloth or possibly a waist of brilliant yellow. This
combination of hues, of course, is only a specimen. The actual
colors are variable but the brilliancy is invariable.
Furthermore, the celebrated Old Lady of Banbury Cross, who
boasted of rings, on her fingers and bells on her toes, would find
her glory vanish in a twinkling should she visit India. Not
content with these preliminary beginnings of adornment, the
barefooted Hindu woman wears — if she can afford it — a
band or two of anklets, bracelets halfway from wrist to elbow,
armlets beyond the elbow, ear-rings of immense size, a neck-
lace or two, toe-rings and a bejewelled nose-ring as big around
as a turnip. Sometimes the jewelry on a woman's feet will
rattle as she walks like the trace-chains on a plow-horse on
the way to the barn.
This barbaric display of jewelry, it should be said, is not
made solely for purposes of show. The truth is that the native
has not grown used to the idea of savings banks (although the
government is now gradually convincing him that the postal
savings institutions are safe), and when he earns a spare rupee
he puts it into jewelry to adorn the person of himself or
"THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" 217
hii wife. If all tlie idle treasures which the poor of India
now carry on their legs, arms, ears, and noses were put into
productive industry, a good deal might be done to alleviate
the misery for which the agitators profess to blame the British
Government.
Calcutta, India.
xxn
HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE
IN THE rural villages, of course, the majority of the inhabi-
tants are farmers, who fare afield each morning with their
so-called plows or other tools for aiding the growth of
their crops. The Indian plow is, I believe, the crudest
I have found in any part of the wide world. It consists of a
simple handle with a knob at the top; a block of wood with
an iron spike in it about an inch thick at one end and tapering
to a point at the other; and a tongue to which the yoke of bul-
locks are attached. The pointed spike is, perhaps, sixteen
inches long, but only a fraction of it projects from the wooden
block into which it is fastened, and the ordinary plowing con-
sists only of scratching the two or three inches of the soil's
upper crust.
The AUabahad Exposition was designed mainly to interest
the farmers in better implements, and its Official Handbook,
in calling attention to the exhibit of improved plows, declared :
"The ordinary Indian plow is, for certain purposes, about as inefficient as it
could be. Strictly speaking it is not a plow at all. It makes a tolerably efficient
seed-drill, a somewhat inefficient cultivator, but it is quite incapable of break-
ing up land properly."
The other tools in use on the Indian farm are fit companions
for the primitive plow. Some one has said that 75 cents would
buy the complete cultivating outfit of the Hindu ryot! I
saw men cutting up bullock-feed with a sort of hatchet; the
threshing methods are centuries old; the little sugarcane mills
218
HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE
219
I found in operation here and there could have been put into
bushel baskets. The big ox carts, which together with camel
carts meet all the requirements of travel and transportation,
are also heavy and clumsy, having wheels as big as we should
use on eight-horse log-wagons at home. These wheels are
without metal tires of any kind, and the average cost of one of
the carts, a village carpenter told me, is $25.
As to the other crops grown by the Indian ryot, or farmer, I
cannot perhaps give a better idea than by quoting the latest
statistics as to the number of acres planted to each as I ob-
tained them from the government authorities in Calcutta.
Rice. . .
Wheat . .
Barley . .
Millets , .
Maize .
Other grains
Fodder crops
73,000,000 Oilseeds : linseed, mustard,
21,000,000
8,000,000
41,000,000
7,000,000
47,000,000
5,000,000
sesamum, etc.
Sugarcane
Cotton
Jute ....
Opium (for China)
Tobacco .
Orchard and garden
14,000,000
2,250,000
13,000,000
3,000,000
416,000
1,000,000
5,000,000
It is somewhat surprising to learn that of the 246,000,000
acres under cultivation to supply 300,000,000 people (the
United States last year cultivated 250,000,000 acres to supply
90,000,000) only 28,000,000 acres were cropped more than once
during the year. With the warm climate of India it would
seem that two or more crops might be easily grown, but the
annual dry season makes this less feasible than it would appear
to the traveller. Even in January much artificial crop-watering
must be done, and no one can travel in India long without
growing used to the sight of the irrigation wells. Around them
the earth is piled high, and oxen hitched to the well ropes
draw up the water in collapsible leather bags or buckets.
A general system of elevated ditches then distributes the water
where it is needed.
Concerning the drought, a resident of Muttra said to me that
220 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
there practically no rain falls from the middle of January to
the middle of June. "In the latter part of the drought," he
said, "the fields assume the appearance of deserts; only the
duU green of the tree-leaves varies the vast, monotonous gray-
brown of the far-stretching plains. The streams are dried up;
the cattle hunt the parched fields in vain for a bit of succulence
to vary their diet of dry grass. But at last there comes the
monsoon and the rains — and then the Resurrection Morning,
The dead earth wakens to joyous fruitfulness, and what was but
yesterday a desert has become a veritable Garden of Eden."
But, alas ! sometimes the rains are delayed — long, tragically
long delayed! The time for their annual return has come — •
has passed, and still the pitiless sun scorches the brown earth
as if it would set afire the grass it has already burned to tinder-
dryness. The ryot's scanty stock of grain is running low,
the daily ration has been reduced until it no longer satisfies
the pangs of hunger, and with each new sunrise gaunt Famine
stalks nearer to the occupants of the mud-dried hut. The
poor peasant lifts vain hands to gods who answer not; unavail-
ingly he sacrifices to Shiva, to Kali, to all the heartless Hindu
deities of destruction and to unnamed demons as well. The
Ancient Terror of India approaches; from time immemorial
the vengeful drought has slain her people in herds, like plague-
stricken cattle, not by hundreds and thousands, but by tens
of thousands and hundreds of thousands. In Calcutta I saw
several young men whom the mission school rescued from
starvation in the last great famine of 1901—02 and heard moving
stories of that terrible time. Many readers will recall the aid
that America then sent to the suffering, but in spite of the com-
bined efforts of the British Government and philanthropic
Christendom, 1,236,855 people lost their lives. To get a better
grasp upon the significance of these figures it may be mentioned
that if every man, woman, and child in eight American states
and territories at that time (Delaware, Utah, Idaho, New
Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada) had been
HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 231
swallowed up in a night, the total loss of life would not have
been so great as In this one Indian famiue.
AppaUing as these facts are, it must nevertheless be remem-
bered that the loss would have been vastly greater but for the
excellent system of famine relief which the British Government
has now worked out. It has built railways all over India, so
that no longer will it be possible for any great area to suffer
while another district having abundance is unable to share
its bounty because of absence of transportation. In the second
place, the government has wisely arranged to give work at
low wages to famine sufferers — road building, railroad build-
ing, or something of the kind — instead of dispensing a reckless
charity which too often pauperizes those it is intended to help.
Before the British occupation India was scourged both by
famine and by frequent, if not almost constant, wars between
neighboring states. The fighting it has stopped entirely, the
loss by drought it has greatly reduced; and some authority
has stated (I regret that I have not been able to get the exact
figures myseK) that for a century before the British assumed
control, war and famine kept the population practically station-
ary, while since then the number of inhabitants has practically
trebled.
Not unworthy of mention, even in connection with its work
in relieving famine sufferers, is the excellent work the British
Government is doing in enabling the farmers to free themselves
from debt. The visitor to India comes to a keener apprecia-
tion of Rudyard Kipling's stories and poems of Indian life
because of the accuracy with which they picture conditions;
and the second "Maxim of Hafiz" is only one of many that
have gained new meaning for me since my coming:
"Yea, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannmn,
If he borrowed in life from a native at 60 per cent, per annmn."
When I first heard of "60 per cent, per annum," and even of
70 per cent, or SO per cent., as the ordinary rate of interest paid
•im WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
by the Indian ryot to the merchant or money-lender, I could
not believe it, but further investigation proved the statement
true. In the United Provinces I found that in some cases
the ryot has been little better than a serf. The merchant
has "furnished him supplies, " adding interest at the rate of one
anna on each rupee at the end of each month — 6| per cent.,
not a year but a month, and that compounded every 30 days !
In one case that came to my attention, two orphan boys twenty
years ago, in arranging the marriage of their sister, borrowed
100 rupees at 50 per cent, interest. For seventeen years there-
after they paid 50 rupees each year as interest, until an Ameri-
can missionary took up the account at 5 per cent, instead of
50, and in two years they had paid it off with only 7 rupees
more than they had formerly paid as annual tribute to the
money-lender. In many such cases debts have been handed
down from generation to generation, for the Hindu code of
honor will not permit a son to repudiate the debts of his father;
and son, grandson, and great-grandson have , staggered under
burdens they were unable to get rid of.
In this situation the cooperative credit societies organized
under government supervision have proved a godsend to the
people, and thousands of ryots through their aid are now getting
free of debt for the first time in their lives, and their families
for perhaps the first time in generations. Each member of a
cooperative credit society has some interest in it; the govern-
ment will lend at 4 per cent, an amount not greater than the
total amount deposited by all the members; stringent regula-
tions as to loans and their security, deposit of surplus funds,
accounting, etc., are in force, and altogether the plan is working
remarkably well. The latest report I have shows that in a
single twelvemonth the total working capital of these societies
increased more than 300 per cent.
The United States seems to be about the only fairly civilized
country in which some form of cooperative credit society,
with government aid, has not been worked out.
HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 223
Of great help to the small farmer also has been the action
of the government in regulating land-rents in crowded dis-
tricts. The courts see to it that no landlord raises rents un-
fairly. One Brahmin freeholder I met in a small village
(he owned 250 acres, worth from $130 to $275 per acre) told
me his rents were 32 to 40 rupees (or from $10 to $13) per acre.
He grows wheat and cotton, and appeared to be quite intelli-
gent as well as prosperous, although he wore nothing save a
turban and an abbreviated lower garment not quite stretching
from his loins to his knees, the rest of his body being entirely
naked.
That the day laborer in India can have but small hope of
buying land at $100 to $300 an acre (and I think these prices
general) is indicated by the fact that when I asked, in the next
village, the wage per month, I was told, "Four or five rupees
($1.28 to $1.60), the laborer boarding himself."
"And how much is paid per day when a single day's labor
is wanted?" I asked.
"Two annas and bread," was the reply. (An anna is 2
cents.)
My informant was the schoolmaster of Khera Kalan village.
At his school he told me that the children of farmers were allowed
tuition free; the children of the village people pay 1 to 3 annas
a month. But so hard is the struggle to get enough coarse
grain to keep soul and body together (the peasant can seldom
afford to eat rice or wheat) that few farm children are free
from work long enough to learn to read and write.
It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of
bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless
surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little
group whom I found squatted around a missionary's knees in
a little mud-walled yard just before I left Khera Kalan that
afternoon. Outside a score of camels were cropping the leaves
from the banyan trees (the only regular communication with
the outside world is by camel cart) and the men of the village
224 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
were grinding sugarcane on the edge of the far-reaching fields
of green wheat and yellow-blossomed mustard. Not far away
was a Hindu temple; not far away, too, the historic Grand
Trunk Road which leads through Khyber Pass into the strange
land of Afghanistan. It is the road, by the way, over which
Alexander the Great marched his victorious legions into India,
and over which centuries later Tamerlane came on his terror-
spreading invasion. But this has nothing to do with the little
half-naked boys and girls we are now concerned with. They
had gathered around the Padre to recite the Ten Command-
ments and the Lord's Prayer in Hindustani. I asked how
many had been to school (only one responded), asked something
about their games, told them something about America, and
then their instructor inquired (interpreting all the time for me,
of course) :
"And what message would you like for the Sahib to give the
boys and girls of America for you.?"
"Tell them. Salaam," was the quick chorus in reply.
"And that is good enough, I guess," remarked the American
who is now giving his life to the Indian people, "for Salaam
means, Peace be to you."
So indeed I pass on the message to the fortunate boys and
girls of the United States who read this article. " Salaam,"
— Peace be to you, Little Ones. You will never even know
how favored of Heaven you are in having been born in a land
where famine never threatens death to you and your kindred,
where the poor have homes that would seem almost palatial to
the average Indian child; where educational opportunities are
within the reach of all; where the religion of the people is an
aid to moral living and high ideals instead of being a hindrance
to them; where no caste system decrees that the poorest children
shall not rise above the condition of their parents; where a wage-
scale higher far than six cents a day enables the poorest to
have comforts and cherish ambitions; and where the humblest
"boy bom in a log cabin" may dream of the Presidency instead
fflNDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 225
of being an outcast whose very touch the upper orders would
account more polluting than the touch of a beast.
Ah, the little fate-cursed Indian brats, some of them wearing
rings in their noses and not much else, who send the message
through me to you — think of them to-night and be glad that
to you the lines have fallen in pleasanter places.
Salaam, indeed, O happy little folk of my own home-
land across the seas! Peace be to you!
Jeypore, India.
XXIII
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA
F HINDUISM as a religious or ecclesiastical institu-
tion we had something to say in another chapter;
of Hinduism as Social Fact bare mention was made.
And yet it is in its social aspects, in its enslavement
of all the women and the majority of the men who come within
its reach, that Hinduism presents its most terrible phases.
For Hinduism is Caste and Caste is Hinduism. Upon the in-
nate. Heaven-ordained superiority of the Brahmin and the
other twice-born castes, and upon the consequent inferiority of
the lower castes, the whole system of Brahminism rests.
Originally there were but four castes : The Brahmin or priest
caste who were supposed to have sprung from the head of Brah-
ma or God; the Kshatriya or warrior caste who sprang from his
arms, the Vasiya or merchant and farmer class who sprang
from his thigh, and the Sudra or servant and handicraftsmen
class who came from his feet. The idea of superiority by birth
having once been accepted as fundamental, however, these
primary castes were themselves divided and subdivided along
real or imaginary lines of superiority or inferiority until to-day
the official government statistics show 2378 castes in India.
You cannot marry into any one of the other 2377 classes of Hin-
dus; you cannot eat with any of them, nor can you touch any
of them.
Thus Caste is the Curse of India. It is the very antithesis
of democracy — blighting, benumbing, paralyzing to all aspi-
ration and all effort at change or improvement.
S26
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 227
No man may rise to a higher caste than that into which he is
bom; but he may fall to a lower one.
There is no opportunity for progress; the only way to move
is backward. Don't kick against the pricks therefore. You
were bom a Brahmin with wealth and power because you won
the favor of the gods in some previous existence; or you were
born a Sudra, predestined to a life of suffering and semi-star-
vation, because in your previous existence you failed to merit
better treatment from the gods. If you are only a sweeper,
be glad that you were not born a pig or a cobra. Kismet,
Fate, has fixed at birth your changeless station in this life;
and, more than this, it has written on your brow the things
which must happen to you throughout your whole existence.
The Brahmin put himself into a position of superiority
and then said to all the other classes : Rebel not at the inequal-
ities of life. They are ordained of the gods. The good that
the higher castes enjoy is the reward of their having conducted
themselves properly in previous existences. Submit yourself
to your lot in the hope that with obedience to what the Brah-
mins tell you, you may possibly likewise win birth into a higher
caste next time. But strike a Brahmin even so much as with
a blade of grass and your soul shall be reborn into twenty and
one lives of impure animals before it assumes human shape
again.
Never in human history has the ingenuity of a ruling class
devised a cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its suprem-
acy. Never has there been a religion more depressing, more
hopeless, more deadening to all initiative. "Jo hxyta so hota,^'
— " What is happening was to happen " — so said the wounded
men who had gone to the Bombay hospital to have their limbs
amputated a few days before I got there. "It is written on
my forehead," a man will often say with stoical indifference
when some calamity overtakes him, in allusion to the belief
that on the sixth night after birth Vidhata writes on every
man's forehead the main events of his life-to-be, and no act
238 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
of his can change them. "I was impelled of the gods to do
the deed," a criminal will say in the courts. *'And I am im-
pelled of the gods to punish you for it," the judge will some-
times answer. If plague comes, the natives can only be brought
by force to observe precautions against it. "If we are to die,
we shall die; why offend the gods by attempting interference
with their plans?" The fatalism of the East as expressed by
Omar Khayyam is the daily creed of India's millions:
"We are no other than a Moving Row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go. . . .
"But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days."
It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted;
but for this belief that all things are predestined, no people
would ever have been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny
of the caste system. Perhaps it should also be added that the
belief in the transmigration of the soul has also had a not in-
considerable influence. Though you have fared ill in this
life, a million rebirths may be yours ere you finally win absorp-
tion into Brahma, and in these million future lives the gods may
deal more prodigally with you. Indeed, the things you most
desire may be yours in your rebirth. "You are interested
in India; therefore you may have your next life as an Indian,"
an eminent Hindu said to me. But Heaven forbid !
At any rate, with this double layer of nourishing earth —
the belief, first, that what you are now is the result of your
actions in previous lives, and, secondly, that there are plenty
more rebirths in which any merit you possess may have its
just recompense of reward, the caste system has flourished
like the Psalmist's green bay tree, though its influence has
been more like that of the deadly upas.
If you are a high-caste man you may not only refuse to eat
with or touch a low-caste man, your equal perhaps in intel-
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 229
ligence and in morals, but in some cases you may even demand
that the low-caste man shall not pollute you by coming too
near you on the road. On page 540 of the 1901 "Census of
India Report" will be found a table showing at what distances
the presence of certain inferior classes become contaminating
to a Brahmin! Moreover, the low-caste man, offensive to
men, is taught that he is equally offensive to the gods. He
must not worship in the temples; must not even approach them.
Usually it is taken for granted that no Pariah will take such a
liberty, but in some places I have seen signs in English posted
on the temple gates warning tourists who have low-caste ser-
vants that these servants cannot enter the sacred buildings.
Not only are these creatures of inferior orders vile in them-
selves, but the work which they do has also come to be regarded
as degrading. A high-caste man will not be caught doing any
work which is "beneath him." The cook will not sweep;
the messenger boy would not pick up a book from the floor.
The liveried Brahmin who takes your card at the American
Consulate in Calcutta once lost his place rather than pick up a
slipper; rather than humiliate himself in such fashion he would
walk half a mile to get some other servant for the duty. It is
no uncommon thing to find that your servant will carry a pack-
age for you, but will hire another servant if a small package
of his own is to be moved. "I had a boy for thirteen years,
the best boy I ever had, till he died of the plague," a Bombay
Englishman said to me, "and he shaved me regularly all the
time. But when I gave him a razor with which to shave him-
self, I found it did no good. He would have 'lost caste' if he
had done barber's work for anybody but a European!"
"I have a good sweeper servant," a Calcutta minister told
me, "but if I should attempt to promote him beyond his caste
and make a house-servant of him, every other servant I have
would leave, including my cook, who has been a Christian
twenty years!"
The absurdities into which the caste system runs are well
mo WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAXING UP
illustrated by some facts which came to my notice on a visit
to a school for the Dom caste conducted by some English people
in Benares. The Doms burn the bodies of the dead at the
Ganges ghats, and do other "dirty work." Incidentally they
form the "thief caste" in Benares, and whenever a robbery
occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom is guilty.
For this reason a great number of Doms (they belong to the
Gypsy class and have no houses anywhere) make it a practice
to sleep on the ground just outside the police station nearly
all the year round, reporting to the authorities so as to be able
to prove an alibi in case of a robbery. So low are the Doms
that to touch anything belonging to one works defilement;
consequently they leave their most valuable possessions un-
guarded about their tents or shacks, knowing full well that
not even a thief of a higher caste will touch them.
"We had a servant," a Benares lady said to me, "who lost
his place rather than take up one end of a forty-foot carpet
while a Dom had hold of the other end. The new bearer, his
successor, did risk helping move a box with a Dom handling the
other side of it, but he was outcasted for the action, and it cost
him 25 rupees to be reinstated. And until reinstated, of course,
he could not visit kinsmen or friends nor could friends or kins-
men have visited him even to help at a funeral; his priest, his
barber, and his washerman would have shunned him. Again,
our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of the Brali-
mins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chip-
rassi or messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the
letter on the floor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes
the pollution that would come from actual contact with the
chiprassi." Moreover, there are social gradations even among
the Doms. One Dom proudly confided to this lady that he
was a sort of superior being because the business of his family
was to collect the bones of dead animals, a more respectable
work than that in which some other Doms engaged !
Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 231
tells how one day when a dead eat had to be moved from her
yard her sweeper proudly pulled himself up and assured her
that, though the lowest among all servants, he was still too
high to touch the body of a dead animal!
My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes
this a suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences
of a well-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places
in India. The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last
been exterminated, but the English Government has not yet
been able to end the activities of those who regard the plunder
of the public as their immemorial right. In Delhi a friend of
mine told me that the watchmen are known to be of the robber
class. "You hire one of them to watch your house at night,
and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that
mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left
his shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection
enough, as the robbers would see that I had paid the proper
blackmail by hiring one of their number as chowkidar."
In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element
carrying things with a much higher hand. "There's where
they live," Dr. J. P. Jones, the well-known writer on Indian
affairs, said to me as we were coming home one nightfall,
"and the people of Madura pay them a tribute amounting
to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of their own
whom they always consult before making a raid. If he signi-
fies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise, not —
though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with
the verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the
great majority of cases."
India's most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping
down roots from a score or a hundred limbs; these roots
fasten themselves in the earth and later become parent trees
for other multiplying limbs and roots, until the whole earth is
covered. In much the same fashion the Indian caste system has
232 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
developed. Instead of the four original castes there are now
more than five hundred times that number, and the system
now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what social
station the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to
the grave (or from the time the conch shell announces
the birth of a man-child till the funeral pyre consumes his
body, to use Indian terminology), but also decrees almost as
irrevocably what business he may or may not follow. A little
American girl of my acquaintance once announced that she
hadn't decided whether she would be a trained nurse, a chorus-
girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any such
embarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or
a thief is largely decided for him before he knows his own name.
"But isn't the system weakening now?" the reader asks,
as I have also asked in almost every quarter of. India. The
general testimony seems to be that it is weakening, and yet in
no very rapid manner. Eventually, no doubt, it will die, but
it will die hard. A few weeks ago, a Parliament of Relig-
ions was held in connection with the AUabahad Exposition,
with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as the presid-
ing officer. In the course of his "Presidential Address" the
Maharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system,
resorting in part to so specious an argument as the following:
" K education means the drawing forth of the potentialities of a boy and fit-
ting him for taking his ordained place as a member of society, then the caste
system has hitherto done this work in a way which no other plan yet contrived
has ever done. The mere teaching of a youth a smattering of the three R's
and nothing else in a primary school is little else than a mere mockery. Un-
der the caste system the boys are initiated and educated almost from infancy
into the family industry, trade, profession, or handicraft, and become adepts in
their various lines of life almost before they know it. This unique system of
education is one of the blessings of our caste arrangement. We know that a
horse commands a high price in the market if it has a long pedigree behind it.
It is not unreasonable to presume that a carpenter whose forefathers have fol-
lowed the same trade for centmies will be a better carpenter than one who is
new to the trade — all other advantages being equal."
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 233
In the phrase, "his ordained place as a member of society,"
we have the keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole
caste system rests. It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to
have the people believe that his sons were "ordained" of
Heaven to be rulers, even if "not fit to stop a gully with,"
and the Sudra's sons "ordained" to be servants, no matter what
their qualities of mind and sovd. But the caste system is
rotting down in other places and sometime or other this "or-
dained" theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric
will totter to the ruin it has long and richly merited.
The introduction of railways has proved one of the great
enemies of caste. Men of different rank who formerly would
not have rubbed elbows under any considerations sit side by
side in the railway cars — and they prefer to do it rather than
travel a week by bullock-cart to reach a place which is but
a few hours by tram. Consequently the priests have had to
wink at "breaking caste" in this way, just as they had to get
around the use of waterworks in Calcutta. According to the
strict letter of the law a Hindu may not drink water which
has been handled by a man of lower caste (in Muttra I have
seen Brahmins hired to give water to passersby), but the
priests decided that the payment of water-rates might be
regarded as atonement for the possible defilement, and con-
sequently Hindus now have the advantages of the city water
supply.
Foreign travel has also jarred the caste system rather se-
verely. The Hindu statutes strictly forbid a man from leaving
the boundaries of India, but the folk have progressed from
technical evasion of the law to open violation of its provisions.
In Jeypore I saw the half -acre of trunks and chests which the
Maharaja of that province used for transporting his goods and
chattels when he went to attend the coronation of the King
of England. The Maharaja is a Hindu of the Hindus, claims
descent from one of the high and mighty gods, and when he
was named to go to London, straightway declared that the
234 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
caste law against leaving India stood hopelessly in the way.
Finally, however, he was convinced that by taking all his
household with him, his servants, his priests, material for set-
ting up a Hindu temple, a six-months' supply of Ganges water,
etc., he might take enough of India with him to make the trip
in safety, and he went. Now many are going without any
such precautions, and a moderate fee paid to the priests usually
enables them to resume caste relations upon their return.
Sometimes, however, the penalties are heavier. A Hindu
merchant of Amritsar, who grew very friendly with a Delhi
friend of mine on a voyage from Europe, said just before
reaching Bombay : " Well, I shall have to pay for all this when I
get home, and I shall be lucky if I get off without making a
pilgrimage to all the twelve sacred places of our religion.
And in any case I shall never let my wife know that I have
broken caste by eating with foreigners." My impression is,
however, that only in a very few cases now is the crime of
foreign travel punished so severely. In Madras I met one of
the most eminent Hindu leaders, Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer.
"Caste has kept me from going abroad until now," he told me,
"but I have made up my mind to let it interfere no longer.
Just as soon as business permits, I shall go to Europe and
possibly to America."
Christianity is another mightily effective foe of Caste. As
in the olden days, it exalts the lowly and humbles the proud.
In Muttra I found a converted high-caste Brahmin acting as
sexton of a Christian church whose members are sweepers
— outcast folk whom as a Hindu he would have scorned to
touch. On the other hand, the acceptance of Christianity
frees a man from the restrictions imposed upon a low caste,
even though it does not give him the privileges of a higher
caste and thus often wins for the Christianized Hindu higher
regard from all classes. Thus there was in Moradabadad
some years ago the son of a poor sweeper who became a Chris-
tian, and was a youth of such fine promise that a way was
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 235
found for him to attend Oxford University. Returning, h®
became a teacher in Moradabadad Mission School and won
such golden opinions from his townspeople that when he died
the whole city — Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians alike
— stopped for his funeral.
In its present elaborate form the caste system is undoubtedly
doomed. It is too purely artificial to endure after the people
acquire even a modicum of education. Perhaps it was
planned originally as a means of preserving the racial integrity
and political superiority of the Aryan invaders, but for un-
numbered centuries it has been simply a gigantic engine of
oppression and social injustice. At the present time no blood
or social difference separates the great majority of castes from
the others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and
so high an authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that
even in the beginning all the castes save the Sudras were of
the same race and blood.
If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent the
intermarriage of radically different races, this may be accom-
plished, as it is accomplished in our own Southern States,
without restricting the right of the individual to engage in any
line of work for which he is fitted or to go as high in that work
as his ability warrants. Booker Washington, born in the
South's lowest ranks, becomes a world-figure; had he been born
in India's lowest caste, he would have remained a burner of
dead bodies. To compare the South's effort to preserve race
integrity with India's Juggernaut of caste is absurd.
Bombay, India.
XXIV
THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN
IN INDIA marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert
Compton remarks. There are no bachelors or old maids.
Children in their cradles are not infrequently given in
marriage by their parents; they are sometimes promised
in marriage (contingent upon sex) before they are born.
"You are married, of course?" the zenana women will ask
when an American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the
answer is in the negative, "Why not.^ Couldn't they get
anybody to have you?"
"Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow,"
is an Indian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot
of woman is hard if she be a wife; it is immeasurably harder
if she be a widow. Hinduism enslaves a majority of the men
within its reach; of the women within its reach it enslaves all.
I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of
a civilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept
this standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near
the bottom. In the great temple at Madura are statues of
"The Jealous Husband" who always carried his wife with
him on his shoulder wherever he went; and the attitude of the
man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as a system.
It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that woman
is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "Dhar-
ma Sastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases:
"It is the nature of woman in this world to cause men to sin.
A female is able to draw from the right path, not a fool
236
THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 237
only, but even a sage." And the "Code of Hindu Laws,"
drawn up by order of the Indian Government for the guidance
of judges, declares:
"A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in subjection
that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her
own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will
behave amiss, A woman is not to be relied on."
" Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without
doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar."
In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman
has been divided into "the three subjections." In childhood
she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband;
in widowhood to her sons or — most miserable of all ! — lack-
ing a son, to her husband's kinsmen. Her husband is supposed
to stand to her almost in the relation of a god. "No sacrifice
is allowed to women apart from their husbands," says Manu,
"no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife honors
her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven," And a recent
Hindu writer says, "To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas
(the Hindu scriptures). To worship the husband is to wor-
ship the gods."
Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are
doubly hard on the women. The women may no more rise above
their caste than the male members of the family; and they are
predestined to take up life's most serious duties before their
fleeting childhood has spent itself. No wonder they look old
before they are thirty !
If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India,
a trip through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts.
A law enacted by the British Government a few years ago
decrees that while the marriage ceremonies may be performed
at any age, the girl shall not go to her husband as his wife until
she is twelve years old; but it is doubtful if even this mild
measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I attended an elaborate
288 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was told that the bride
was "eleven or twelve" and would go to her husband's
home (he lives with his father, of course) the following week.
My travelling servant told me that he was married when he
was sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years
longer with her parents before coming to him. The first
American lady I met in India was telling of a wedding she
had recently attended, the bride being a girl of eleven and the
groom a year or two older. In Secunderabad a friend of mine
found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who had been given in
marriage, and in the house where he visited was a ten-year-old
girl who had been married two years before to a man of thirty.
In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls
Manu named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maxi-
mum. The father who delays finding a husband for his daugh-
ter until after she is twelve is regarded as having committed
a crime — though it must always be remembered that girls
and boys in India mature a year or two younger than boys
and girls in the United States.
One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost
increases with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies
in all cases are expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish
about as much excitement as circuses at home. My first
introduction to a Hindu wedding was in Agra one Sunday
afternoon — though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is the same
as any other day — and the shops were in full blast (if such a
strenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless
Hindu merchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy
as they ever are. From afar the sound of drums smote my ear,
and as the deafening hullabaloo came nearer its volume and
violence increased until it would have sufficed to bring down
the walls of Jericho in half the time Joshua took for the job.
Just behind the drummers came two gorgeously clad small
boys astride an ass begarlanded with flowers; and when the
musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so as
THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 239
to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the
meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-
year-old small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and
gauze and who ought to have been at home studying the Sec-
ond Reader, was on his way to be married, and the little chap
riding behind him was the brother of the bride. It was very
hard to realize that such tots were not merely "playing
wedding" instead of being principal participants in a serious
ceremony !
The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged
for a couple who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society,
and though no one could have asked for a more gracious wel-
come than my American friend and I received, I very much
doubt if any one of the high-caste folk about us would have
condescended to eat at the same table with us even to end a
three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Earn by name, was a
nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently
pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already
been a three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's
house, we were told, and this was the fifth and last day of the
ceremonies and feasts arranged by the groom's father. One
thousand people had been invited and, judging from the rich-
ness of the food with which we were served, I should think
that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5G00 rupees, or
$1633, was none too high.
Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor
father, or a father with several daughters to find husbands for,
must often strain his credit to the utmost in providing dowries.
It is said that among the humbler classes a father will some-
times mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this
purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who
has gone to the groom's father with the story that the bride is
"as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant,
and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's " — he must also be paid
for his indispensable services.
240 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her
childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man —
whose face she may never have seen but once or twice — to
take up the hard life of a Hindu wife in the home of her
father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet from her infancy she
has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion of the infe-
riority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so galling
as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at
the same table with her husband, but must be content with
what he leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in
bringing the people to a higher appreciation of the dignity of
womanhood. "Some of my girls are engaged to be married,'*
Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home in Calcutta, said to me,
"and when their fiances come to call, after the Christian
fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors while the
boys are seated."
Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread:
either that her husband may die or that he may supplant her
by a second wife. If she Uves seven years as a wife without
giving birth to a son, the husband is authorized by law and
religion to take a second spouse; and in nearly all such cases
the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W. J. Wilkins says
that a servant in his employ married a second wife and in-
sisted that the first should not only support herself but con-
tribute the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2.
The older wife is tantalized by the thought that she herself
was selected by the parents of her husband, while the new wife
is probably his own choice; and another cause of jealousy is
found in the new wife's youth. For no matter how old the man
himself may be — forty, fifty or sixty — his bride is always a
girl of twelve or thereabouts — and for the very simple reason
that practically no girls remain single longer, and widows are
never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay
of a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an
agent to his native village and caste with power to negotiate.
THE TAJ MAHAL FROM THE ENTRANCE GATE
The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful than the
building itself
• --TTC-^A^f s R *^*
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'dk:*t.
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jM
M
y
jSL ^
ill
31
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^^^^^a^^HHy
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K
m
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V,
AK\L
GUNGA DIN ON DRESS PARADE
Ordinarily the Indian water carrier, or bkisti, is attired more nearly after
the manner described in Kipling's poem:
"The uniform 'e wore
Was nothing much before
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind.
For a twisty piece o' rag and a goatskin leather bag
Was all the 6eld equipment 'e could find."
THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 243
"My friends have persuaded me that I ought not to marry
a very young girl," he said to the agent, "get an older one there-
fore ^ — oh, it doesn't matter if she is twenty-four."
The agent left and two days thereafter the Hindu received
this message: "Can't find one of twenty-four. How about
two of twelve each?"
The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing
to the troubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brah-
minism is that she is responsible through some evil committed
either in this existence or a previous one, for the death of her
husband, and the crudest indignities of the Hindu social system
are reserved for the bereaved and unfortunate woman. If a
man or boy die, no matter if his wife is yet a prattling girl in
her mother's home, she can never remarry, but is doomed to
live forever as a despised slave in the home of his father and
mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved;
and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humilia-
tion the gods are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her.
In a school I visited in Calcutta I was told that there were two
little widows, one five years old and one six.
Formerly and up to the time that the British Government
stopped the practice less than a century ago, it was regarded
as the widow's duty to burn herself alive on her husband's
funeral pyre. "It is proper for a woman after her husband's
death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws, "to burn herself in
the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus burns herself
shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000 years
by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve
an inviolable chastity." This rite of self-immolation was
known as suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century
ago the suttees numbered one hundred a month. It was an
old custom to set up a stone with carved figures of a man and a
woman to mark the spot where a widow had performed suttee,
and travellers to-day still find these gruesome and barbaric
memorials here and there along the Indian roadsides. More-
244 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
over, the present general treatment of widows in India is so
heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare
that they would prefer the suttee.
And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark;
that a kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows
which blacken the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often
better than their customs and sometimes better than their
religions. The high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan women
who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in the case
of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows of
their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict
letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband,
doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affec-
tion for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the
world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a
high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father
on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and
talking with his daughter who was just budding into maiden-
hood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to
me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it."
Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as
hopeless while the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the
most beautiful monument ever erected in memory of a woman's
love. True, Shah Jehan, the monarch who built it, was not a
Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet Mohammedanism,
although its customs are less brutal, places woman in almost
the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status
of woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great
religions of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an
end by referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures.
Of all that I saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of
the Himalayas from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the
view of the Taj Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon.
The inscription in Persian characters over the archway,
"Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of God,"
THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 245
is enough to assure one that Arimand Banu, "The Exalted
One of the Palace," whose dust it was built to shelter, was
a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and fea-
ture. We know but little about her. There are pictures
which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm;
there are records to show that it was in 1615 that she became
the bride of the prince who later began to rule as "His Imperial
Highness, the second Alexander (Lord of the two Horns)
King Shah Jehan," and we may see in Agra the rooms m the
palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian Nights-like
splendor characteristic of Oriental courts
"Mumtaz-i-Mahal," they called her — "Pride of the Palace."
And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of
motherhood — that way along which woman finds the testing
of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her exist-
ence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that for-
ever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seven times
she walked the mother's ancient way down to the gates of
Death and brought back a new life with her, but the eighth
time she did not return. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carry-
ing in his heart a sorrow which not all his pomp nor power
could heal, declared that she should have the most beautiful
tomb that the mind of man could plan. So the Taj was built
— "in memory of a deathless love," and in a garden which is
always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue
of fountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four
graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, "like four tall court-
ladies tending their princess," there stands this dream in
marble, "the most exquisite building on earth."
With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail
in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that
the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in
a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the
womanhood of the country in which it is so incongruously placed.
Madras, India.
XXV
MORE LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK
THERE are many show places and "points of inter-
est" in India that have a hundred times more
attention in the guide books, but there is a simple
tomb in Lucknow — it cost no more than many
a plain farmer's tombstone in our country burying-places —
which impressed me more than anything else I saw excepting
only the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal and the view of Benares
from the river.
It is the tomb of the heroic Sir Henry Lawrence, who died
so glorious a death in the great mutiny of 1857. No com-
mander in all India has planned more wisely for the defence df
the men and women under his care; and yet the siege had only
begun when he was mortally wounded. He called his suc-
cessor and his associates to him, and at last, having omitted
no detail of counsel or information that might enable them to
carry out his far-seeing plans, he roused himself to dictate
his own immortal epitaph:
Here Lies
HENRY LAWRENCE
Who Tried to Do His Duty
May the Lord Have Mercy on his Soul.
And so to-day these lines, "in their simplicity sublime,"
mark his last resting place; and one feels somehow that not
even the great Akbar in Secundra or Napoleon in Paris has a
worthier monument.
246
LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 247
There are many places in India to which I should like to
give a paragraph. I should like to write much of Delhi and
its palaces in which the Great Moguls once lived in a splendor
worthy of the monarchs in the Arabian Nights — no wonder
the stately Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Public Audience, bears the
famous inscription in Persian:
"If there be Paradise on earth.
It is this, oh, it is this, oh, it is this!"
In the ruins of seven dead and deserted Delhis round about the
present city and the monuments and memorials which com-
memorate "the old far-off unhappy things" of conquered
dynasties and romantic epochs, there is also material for many
a volume.
Then there is Cawnpore with its tragic and sickening mem-
ories of the English women and children (with the handful
of men) who were butchered in cold blood by the treacherous
Nana Dhundu Pant; and I was greatly interested in meeting
in Muttra one of the few living men, a Christianized Brahmin,
who as a small boy witnessed that terrible massacre which for
cruelty and heartlessness is almost without a parallel in mod-
ern history.
In Agra is the Pearl Mosque, which is itself an architectural
triumph splendid enough to make the city famous if the Taj
had not already made it so; the Great Temple in Madura is
one of the most impressive of the strictly Hindu structures in
India; in Madras I found a curious reminder of early missionary
activity in the shape of a cathedral which is supposed to shelter
the remains of the Apostle Thomas; and the ruins of the once
proud and imperial but now utterly deserted cities of Amber
and Fatehpuhr-Sikri have a strange and melancholy interest.
But all these have been often enough described, and there are
things of greater pith and moment in present-day India to
which we can better give attention.
348 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
One thing concerning India, which should perhaps have been
said in the beginning, but which has not had attention until
now, is the fact that it is no more a homogeneous country than
Europe is — • has perhaps, indeed, a greater variety of languages,
peoples, and racial and traditional differences than the Euro-
pean continent. I have already called attention to the fact
that there are 2378 castes. There are also 40 distinct national-
ities or races and 180 languages. For an utterly alien race to
govern peacefully such a heterogeneous conglomeration of
peoples, representing all told nearly one fifth of the population
of the whole earth, is naturally one of the most difficult ad-
ministrative feats in history, and Mr. Roosevelt probably did
not give the English too high praise when he declared: "In
India we encounter the most colossal example history affords
of the successful administration by men of European blood
of a thickly populated region in another continent. It is
the greatest feat of the kind that has been performed since the
break-up of the Roman Empire. Indeed, it is a greater feat
than was performed under the Roman Empire."
I was interested to find that the American-born residents of
India give, if anything, even higher praise to British rule than
the British themselves. "I regard the English official in
India," one distinguished American in southern India went so
far as to say to me, "as the very highest type of administra-
tive official in the world. More than this, 90 per cent, of the
common people would prefer to trust the justice of the British
to that of the Brahmins." In Delhi an American missionary
expressed the opinion that the American Government, if in
control of India, would not be half so lenient with the breeders
of sedition and anarchy as is the British Government.
It should be said, however, that there are now fewer of these
malcontents, and these few are less influential tlian at any
time for some years past. In Madras I was very glad to get
an interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer, one of the most
distinguished of the Hindu leaders.
BATHING IN THE SACRED GANGES AT BENARES
THE BATTLE-SCARRED AND WORLD-FAMOUS RESIDENCY AT
LUCKNOW
The writer was shown through the historic fortress by William Ireland, one
of the few living survivors of the great siege. In Muttra the writer also met
Isa Doss, a Hindu (now a Christian preacher) who saw the massacre of the
English women and children by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant
LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 251
"Lord Morley's reforms," he declared, "have been so exten-
sive and have satisfied such a large proportion of our people
that the extremists no longer have any considerable following.
We no longer feel that it is England's intention to keep us in
the condition of hopeless helots. The highest organization
for the government of the country is the British Secretary of
State and his council; Lord Morley placed two Indians there.
In India the supreme governmental organization is the Gov-
ernor-General and his council; he put an Indian there. In
three large provinces — Bombay, Madras, and Bengal — In-
dians have been added to the executive councils.
"For the first time, too, our people are really an influential
factor in the provincial and imperial legislative councils. We
have had representation in these councils, it is true, for fifty
years; but it was not until 1892 that representation be-
came considerable, and even then the right of the people
to name members was not recognized. So-called consti-
tuencies were given authority to make nominations, but
the government retained the right to reject or confirm these
at pleasure.
"Now, however, through Lord Morley's and Lord Minto's
reforms, the number of Indians on these councils has been
more than doubled — in the case of the Imperial Council
actually trebled — and the absolute right given the people to
elect a large proportion, averaging about 40 per cent, of the
total number, without reference to the wishes of the govern-
ment. In fact, with two fifths of all the members chosen by
the people and a considerable number of other members chosen
from municipal boards, chambers of commerce, universities,
etc., we now see the spectacle of Provincial Councils with non-
official members in the majority. In Bombay the non-official
element is two thirds of the whole; and in Madras also the non-
official members could defeat the government if they chose to
combine and do so. But of course the greater willingness of
the government to cooperate with the people has brought
252 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
about a greater willingness on the part of the people to co-
operate with the government.
"The appointment of Indians to the highest offices charged
with the responsibility of government; the increased repre-
sentation given the people on the legislative and executive
councils; the recognition of the right of the people to elect
instead of merely to nominate members; and the surrender
of majority-control to the non-official element — all these
are very substantial gains, but the spirit back of them is worth
more than the reforms themselves. While there is a feeling
in some quarters that the government has not gone far enough,
the large majority of my educated countrymen regard the
advance as sufficient for the present and look forward with
hope to a further expansion of our powers and privileges."
If I may judge by what I gathered from conversation with
Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, I should say that no one
has given a more accurate and clear-cut statement of the feel-
ings of the Indian people than has Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer in
these few terse sentences.
"The wealth of the Indies" has been a favorite phrase with
romantic writers from time immemorial; and a book now before
me speaks in the most matter-of-course way of "the pros-
perous and peaceful empire." Yet the Indian is really one
of the poorest men on earth. The wealth with which the Mo-
guls and kings of former ages dazzled the world was wrung from
the hard hands of peasants who were governed upon the theory
that what the king wanted was his, and what he left was theirs.
Even the splendid palaces and magnificent monuments, such
as the Taj Mahal, were built largely by forced, unpaid labor.
In some cases it is said that the monarch did not even deign
to furnish food for the men whom he called away from the
support of their families.
An ignorant people is always a poor people, and we have
already seen that only 10 per cent, of the men in India can read
or write, and of these 10 per cent, the majority are Brahmins.
LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 253
Then, again, the people use only the crudest tools and ma-
chinery; and a third factor in keeping them poor is the system
of early marriage. When it is a common thing for a boy of
fifteen or sixteen to be the father of a growing family, it is
easy to see that not much can be laid up for rainy days.
Owing to the absence of diversified industries, the crude-
ness of the tools, the ignorance of the men behind the tools, and
the over-crowded population of folk hard-pressed by poverty,
the wages are what an American would call shamefully low.
An Englishman who had lived in an interior jungle-village,
five days by bullock-cart from a railway, told me that twenty
years ago laborers were paid 2 rupees (64 cents) a month,
boarding themselves, or 4 rupees ($1.28) a year and grain.
The wages have now advanced, however, to 5 rupees ($1.60)
a month where the man boards himself; and for day labor the
wages are now five annas (10 cents) instead of two annas
(4 cents) twenty years ago.
In Madura a weU-educated Hindu with whom I was talking
rang the familiar changes on the "increasing cost of living,"
and pointed out that in four or five years the cost of unskilled
labor has increased from eight to twelve cents. "And in some
towns," he declared, looking at the same time as if he feared
I should not believe his story, "they are demanding as much
as 8 annas (16 cents) a day!" In Bombay I was told that
coolies average 16 to 20 cents a day; spinners in jute factories,
$1.16 a week, weavers, $1.82. In a great cotton factory I
visited in Madras, employing about 4000 natives (all males)
the average wages for eleven and a half hours' work is $3.84
to $4,85 a month. In Ahmedabad, another cotton manu-
facturing centre, about the same scale is in force. Miners
get 16 to 28 cents a day. Servants, $3.20 to $3.84 a month.
The women in Calcutta (some of them with their babies
tied out to stakes while they worked) whom I saw carrying
brick and mortar on their heads to the tops of three and four
story buildings, get 3 to 4 annas a day — 6 to 8 cents. In
254 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Darjeeling the bowed and toil-cursed women laden like donkeys,
whom I found bringing stone on their backs from quarries
two or three miles away managed to make 12 to 16 cents a
day for their bitter toil up steep hills and down, for eight long
hours. Women who carried lighter loads of mud, making 50
trips averaging 20 miles of travel, earned only 8 cents, as
did also the women with babies strapped on their backs, who
nevertheless toiled as steadily as the others.
"As for the men I pay these strong, brawny Bhutia fellows
8 annas (16 cents) a day," the contractor told me, "but those
Nepalese who are not so strong get only 5 annas for shovelling
earth."
Director of Agriculture Couclmian of the Madras Presi-
dency gave me the following as the usual scale of wages for
farm work: men 6 to 8 cents; women 4 to 6; children 3 to 5,
the laborers boai'ding themselves.
With this Mr. Couchman, whom I have just mentioned, I
had a very interesting interview in Madras which should shed
some light on Indian agriculture.
"In Madras Presidency," he told me, "we cultivate 10,-
000,000 acres of rice, which is the favorite food of the people.
As it is expensive compared with some cheaper foods, however,
the people put 4,500,000 acres to a sort of sorghum — not the
sorghum cultivated for syrup or sugar but for the seed to be
used as a grain food — and also grow 4,000,000 acres of millet
the seed of which are used as a grain food.
"Then we grow 2,000,000 acres in cotton, but cotton in
India is grown only on black soils. We want some for red
soils, and we are also seeking to increase the yield and the
length of staple in the indigenous varieties. In both these
points the Indian cotton now compares very badly with the
American. Our average yield is only about 50 to 100 pounds
lint per acre, and the staple is only three quarters to five
eights of an inch in length, and not suitable for spinning over
20s in warp.
BURNING THE BODIES OF DEAD HINDUS
AN INDIAN CAMEL CART
TRAVEL IN INDIA
How the author and his friends made the trip from Jeypore to Amber
LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 267
"Of course, with our dense population, land is high and our
system of farming expensive. Good irrigated wet land, used
chiefly for rice, is worth from $166 to $500 per acre, renting for
$20 to $25; dry land sells for $17 to $133 per acre and rents
for from $3 to $5. It is commonly said that a man and his
family should make a living on two acres, and the usual one-
man farm consists of 5 to 10 acres of wet land or 30 to 50 of
dry. The wet land farmers are generally renters, the others
owners. Of course, you have noticed that no horses are used
on the farms, nothing but bullocks; nor do I think that horses
will be used for a long time to come. We are making some
progress in introducing better methods of farming. Little,
of course, can be done with bulletins where such a small
percentage of the people can read, but demonstration farms
have proved quite successful, and the government is much
pleased with the results obtained from employing progressive
native farmers to instruct their neighbors."
The advancing price of cotton has proved a matter of hardly
less interest to India than to America, and for several years
the crop has been steadily increasing. The 1910-11 crop
(the picking ended in May) was almost 4,500,000 bales of
400 pounds each. The necessity for growing food crops,
however, is so imperative that the cotton acreage cannot be
greatly increased — at least not soon. During our Civil
War, it will be remembered, India did her uttermost; and Bom-
bay laid the foundations of her greatness in the high prices
then paid for the fleecy staple. Hers is still a great cotton
market and down one of her main streets from morning to
night one sees an almost continuous line of cotton carts, drawn
by bullocks and driven by men almost as black as our negroes
in the South. I was very much interested in seeing how much
better the lint is baled than in America. In the first place the
bagging is better — less ragged than that we commonly use —
and in the next place it is held in place by almost twice as many
encircling bands or ties as our bales.
258 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
All in all, I regret to say good-by to India. Its people are
poor; its industries primitive; its religion atrocious; its climate
generally oppressive, and yet, after all, there is something
fascinating about the country. For one thing, there is a large
infusion of Aryan blood among the people, and after one has
spent several months among the featureless faces of the
Chinese and Japanese, these Aryan-type faces are strangely
attractive. The speech of the people, too, is picturesque
beyond that of almost any other folk, as readers of Kipling
have come to know. It is very common for a beggar to caU
out, "Oh, Protector of the Poor, you are my father and
mother, help me, help me."
"I salute you," said our old guide at the Kutab Minar,
speaking in his native Hindustani, which my friend interpreted
for me. "I know that you are the kings of the realm, but I
have eaten your salt before, and I am willing to eat it again."
At the end, of course, he wished a tip. "But ask him why
I should give him anything," I said to my friend.
Replying, he mentioned first the number of his children, the
blindness of his wife, and then dropped into the picturesque
native plea: "Besides, you are my father and mother, the
king of the realm, and if I may not look to you, to whom
shall I look?"
"Well, so much lying ought to be worth four annas," I said,
and left him happier with the coin.
There is one thing, of course, that would never do: it would
never do to write about India without saying something about
lions, tigers, and snakes. Last of all, therefore, let me come
to this topic.
I didn't see any tigers, let me say frankly, except those in
cages — though there was one in Calcutta which had slain men
and women before they caught him, and whose titanic fury
as he lunged against his cage-bars, gnashing at the men before
him, I shall never forget. A jackal howled at my room-door
in Jeypore one night; between Jeypore and Bombay monkeys
LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 259
were as thick as rabbits were in the old county where I was
reared; in Delhi only lack of time prevented me from getting
interested in a leopard hunt not many miles away; en route to
Darjeeling I saw a wild elephant staked out in the woods near
where he had evidently been caught; and near Kiera Kalan
I saw wild deer leaping with their matchless grace across the
level plains.
"In my district," one missionary told me, "five or six
people a month are killed by tigers and panthers and even
more by snakes. One panther carried off a man from my
kitchen. We found his body half-eaten in the jungle. It is
customary when a body is found in this condition for hunters
to gather around it and await the return of the tiger or
panther. He will come back when hungry, and there is no other
way so sure for getting a man-eater."
As for snakes, I may mention that when I spent the night
with a friend in Madura I was shown a place near the house
where a deadly cobra had been seen (his bite kills in twenty
minutes), while upon retiring I was given the comforting
assurance that it was not safe to put my foot on the floor at
night without having a light in the room!
As I rode out with Dr. J. P. Jones, of Pasamaila, he pointed
to a grassy mound near the roadside and said.
"See that grave over there? There's rather an interestmg
story connected with it which I'll tell you. One day about
four years ago three snake-charmers came to my house, and
as I had an American friend and his son with me, I decided for
the boy's sake to have them try their art. Only two of the
men had flutes, but one went into my garden and one took up
his post on another side of the house, and began to play. It
wasn't long before one called out, 'Cobra!' and sure enough
there was the snake, which he captured; but on coming back he
declared that he had been bitten. In fact, he showed a bruise,
but I knew that snake-charmers counterfeit these bites, so
I would not believe him. Then the other charmer also cried
260 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
'Cobra!' and captured another snake. They showed me
the fangs of each serpent, and I gave them four annas. I
also offered them four annas more if they would kill the ser-
pents; but of course they would not. 'Man kill cobra, cobra
kill man,' is one of their sayings. And so they left, but the
man who captured the first snake hadn't gone twenty steps
before he fell in convulsions and died. He had really been
bitten, and that is his grave which you see there."
Madura, India.
XXVI
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US
UT, after all, what may the Orient teach us? The
inquiry is a pertinent one. Perhaps it is all the
more pertinent because, while acknowledging that
the old East may learn much from the young West,
we are ordinarily little inclined to look to the Orient for in-
struction for ourselves. In fact, we are not inclined to look
anywhere.
That the germ and promise of all the new Japan was in
the oath taken by the young Mikado in 1868, "to seek out
knowledge in all the world," we are ready to admit, and we
are also ready to admit the truth of what Dr. Timothy Richard
said to me in Peking last November. "This revolutionary
progress in China has come about," he remarked, "because
for twenty years China has been measuring herself with other
countries. It is a comparative view of the world that is
remaking the empire."
In our own case unfortunately, certain natural conditions
as well, perhaps, as the excessive "Ego in our Cosmos," con-
spire to keep us from this corrective "comparative view of
ths world." We are not hemmed about by rival world-powers,
whose activities we are compelled to study, as is the case with
almost every European nation. Barring the Philippines (and
their uncertain value) we have no far-flung battle line to lure
our vision beyond borders. And thus far our growing home
markets have been so remunerative that not even commerce
has induced us to look outward, with the incidental results of
261
262 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
bringing us to realize our defects and remedy them, our strong
points and emphasize them.
For these reasons, I made my trip through the Orient with
an increased desire to bring home the lessons its long experi-
ence should teach us. And now that I come to summarize
these lessons I find a single note running through all — from
beginning to end. And this keynote may be given in a single
word, Conservation: the conservation not only of our natural
resources, but of racial strength and power, of industrial pro-
ductiveness, of commercial opportunities, and of finer things
of the spirit.
Taking up first the matter of natural resources, I may
mention that hardly anything that I saw on my entire trip
burned itself more deeply into my memory than the heavy
penalty that the Celestial Empire is now paying for the neglect
of her forests in former years.
In the country north of Peking I found river valley after
river valley once rich and productive but now become an
abomination of desolation — covered with countless tons of
sand and stone brought down from the treeless mountain-
sides. So long as these slopes were forest-clad, the decaying
leaves and humus gave a sponge-like character to the soil upon
them, and it gave out the water gradually to the streams below.
Now, however, the peaks are in most cases only enormous
rock-piles, the erosion having laid waste the country round-
about; or else they are mixtures of rock and earth rent by
gorges through which furious torrents rush down immediately
after each rainfall, submerging once fruitful plains with rock
and infertile gully-dirt. Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese
peasant once cultivated broad and level fields in such river
valleys, he is now able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches
by piling the rock in heaps and saving a few intervening
arable remnants from the general soil-wreck.
Especially memorable was the ruin — if one may call it
such — of a once deep river, its bed now almost filled with
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 26S
sand and rock, that I crossed on my little Chinese donkey not
far from the Nankou Pass and the Great Wall. Even the
splendid arches of a bridge, built to span its ancient flood, were
almost submerged in sand. Instead of the constant stream
of water that once gladdened the lowlands, there is in each
rainy season a mad torrent that leaves a ruinous deposit be-
hind, and, later, long weeks when the river-bed is as dry as a
desert. So it was when I saw it last fall; and the old stone
bridge, almost sand-covered li^e an Egyptian ruin, was at
once a melancholy monument to the gladness and fertility of
a vanished era, and an argument for forest-conservation
that should carry conviction to all who see it.
The next day as I rode amid the strange traffic of Nankou
Pass I found this argument translated into even more directly
human terms. For of the scores of awkward-moving camels
and quaint-looking Mongolian horses and donkeys that I
saw homeward-bound after their southward trip, a great number
were carrying little bags of coal — dearly bought fuel to be
sparingly used through the long winter's cold in quantities
just large enough to cook the meagre meals, or in extreme
weather to keep the poor peasants from actually freezing.
Only in the rarest cases are the Chinese able to use fuel for
warming themselves; they can afford only enough for cook-
ing purposes.
Yet in sight of the peasant's home, perhaps — in any case,
not far away — are mountain peaks too steep for cultivation,
but which with wise care of the tree-growth would have
provided fuel for thousands and tens of thousands, and at a
fraction of the price at which wood or coal must now be bought.
Japan, Korea, and India — the whole Orient in fact — ^bear
witness to the importance of the forestry messages which
Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt have been drumming
into our more or less uncaring ears for a decade past. When
I reached Yokohama I found it impossible to get into the
northern part of the island of Hondo because of the flood-
264 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
damage to the railroads, and the lives of several friends of
mine had been endangered in the same disaster. The dams
of bamboo-bound rocks that I found men building near Nikko
and Miyanoshita by way of remedy may not amount to much;
but there is much hope in the general programme for refor-
esting the desolated areas, which I found the Japanese De-
partment of Agriculture and Commerce actively prosecuting.
Here is a good lesson for America. In Korea, however, the
Japanese lumbermen, even in very recent years, have given
little thought to the morrow and with such results as might
be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citi-
zens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient
walls, remarked, "When I was young this was called the
Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you
can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places
nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great
damage was done by overflows right here in Seoul."
Yet another kind of conservation to which our people in
Occidental lands need to give more earnest heed is the con-
servation of the individual wealth of the people. The waste-
fulness of the average American is apparent enough from a
comparison of conditions here with conditions in Europe —
when I came back from my first European trip I remarked
that "Europe would live on what America wastes" — but a
comparison of conditions in America with those in the Orient
is even more to our discredit. In Lafcadio Hearn's books on
Japan we find a glorification of the Japanese character that is
unquestionably overdone on the whole, but in his contrast
between the wasteful display of fashion's fevered followers
in America and the ideals of simple living that distinguished old
Japan, there is a rebuke for us whose justice we cannot gainsay.
Take an old Japanese sage like Baron Shibusawa, who, like
Count Okuma, it seems might well have been one of Plu-
tarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention the
extravagance of America as the thing that impressed him more
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 265
than anything else in traveHng in our country. "To spend so
much money in making a mere railroad station palatial as
you have done in Washington, for example, seems to me
uneconomic," he declared.
What most impressed him and other Oriental critics with
whom I talked, be it remembered, was the wastefulness of
expenditures not for genuine comforts but for fashion and dis-
play — the vagaries of idle rich women who pay high prices
for half-green strawberries in January but are hunting some
other exotic diet when the berries get deliciously ripe in May,
and ¥/ho rave over an American Beauty in December but have
no eyes for the i ull-blown glory of the open-air roses in June.
It is such unnatural display that most grates against the "moral
duty of simplicity of life," as Eastern sages have taught it.
"When I was in the Imperial University here in Tokyo,"
a Japanese newspaper man said to me, "my father gave me
six yen a month, $3 American money. I paid for room, light,
and food $1.20 a month; for tuition, 50 cents; for paper,
books, etc., 30 cents; and this left me $1 for pocket money
expenditures, including the occasional treat of eating potatoes
with sugar ! " In such Spartan simplicity the victors of Muk-
den, Liao-yang and Port Arthur were bred.
The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, lyeyasu,
whose tomb at Nikko situated at the end of a twenty-five
mile avenue of giant cryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists,
has expressed in two memorable sayings the Japanese concep-
tion of the essential immorality of waste, of the regard that is
due every product of human labor as being itself in some sense
human or at least a throb with the blood of the toiler who has
wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow. When vir-
tual dictator of Japan, lyeyasu was seen smoothing out an
old silk kakama. "I am doing this," he said, "not because
of the worth of the garment in itself, but because of what it
needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of some poor
woman, and that is why I value it. If we do not think while
266 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
using these things, of the toil and effort required to produce
them,then our want of consideration puts us on a level with the
beasts." Again, when opposing unnecessary purchases of
costly royal garments, he declared. " When I think of the
multitudes around me, and the generations to come after me,
I feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods
in my possession."
No wonder Heam declares of this "cosmic emotion of hu-
manity" which we lack that "we shall certainly be obliged to
acquire it at a later date simply to save ourselves from ex-
termination."
The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the
wastes of war and the wastes of excessive military expenditures
is another lesson that one brings home from a study of con-
ditions abroad. While our American jingoes are using Japan
as a more or less effective bogy to work their purposes, peace
advocates might perhaps even more legitimately hold it up
as a "horrible example" to point their moral as to how war
drains the national revenues and exhausts the national wealth.
In the Mikado's empire the average citizen to-day must pay
30 per cent, of his total income in taxes, the great propor-
tion of this enormous national expenditure growing out of
past wars and preparations for future wars. No wonder
venerable Count Okuma, once Premier of the Empire, said
to me: "I look for international arbitration to come not
as a matter of sentiment but as a matter of cold financial
necessity. Nations have labored for centuries to build up
the civilization of to-day : it is unthinkable that its advantages
must be largely sacrificed for the support of enormous non-
productive armies and navies. That would be simply the
Suicide of Civilization."
For the lesson of all this I may quote the words of Dr.
Timothy Richard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen
in China, in the same conversation from which a fragment
was quoted in the beginning of this article:
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 267
"The world is going to be one before you die, sir," he said
as we talked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden
City. "We are living in the days of anarchy. Unite the
ten leading nations; let all their armaments be united into one
to enforce the decrees of the Supreme Court of the World.
And since it will then be the refusal of recalcitrant nations to
accept arbitration that will make necessary the maintenance
of any very large armaments by these united nations, let
them protect themselves by levying discriminating tariff
duties against the countries that would perpetuate present
conditions."
All this I endorse. The necessity of preserving the national
wealth from the wastes of war I regard as one of the most
important lessons that we may get from the Orient. And
yet I would not have the United States risk entering upon
that military unpreparedness which must prove a fool's paradise
until other great nations are brought to accept the principle
of arbitration. The proper programme is to increase by tenfold
— yes, a hundredfold — our personal and national efforts
for arbitration, at the same time remembering that so long as
the community of nations recognizes the Rule of Force we can-
not secede and set up a reign of peace for ourselves. If it
takes two to make a quarrel, it also takes two to keep a peace.
We must be in terrible earnest about bringing in a new era,
and yet we cannot commit the folly of trying to play the peace
game by ourselves. It is not solitaire.
Even more important, whether we consider it from the
standpoint of the general weKare or as a matter of national de-
fence, is the conservation of our physical stamina and racial
strength. Whether the wars of the future are commercial or
military it doesn't matter. The prizes will go to the people
who are strong of body and clear of mind. "The first requi-
site," said Herbert Spencer, " is a good animal," and not even
the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the good animal
■ — the power of physical vigor and hardness with its concomi-
268 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
tant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring — from becom-
ing a deciding factor in the struggle between nations and
between races. It has been so from the dawn of history and it
will ever be so.
And just here we may question whether the growth of
wealth and luxury in the United States is not tending here, as
it has tended in all other nations, toward physical softness and
deterioration. It may be argued on the contrary that while
a few Occidental children are luxury -weakened, a great body
of Oriental children are drudgery-weakened. But is there
not much more reason to fear that in our case there is really
decay at both ends of our social system — with the pampered
rich children who haven't work enough, and with the hard-
driven poor who have too much.? The overworking of the very
young is certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia;
and even in this matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as
well, according to their lights, as we are. In China manu-
facturing is not yet extensive enough for the problem to be
serious; but in both Japan and India I found the government
councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of conserving
child-life, and grappling with different measures for the pro-
tection of both child and women workers. My recollection is
that the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were
no girls) that I found at work in a Madras cotton mUl already
have better legal protection than is afforded the child-workers
in some of our American states.
For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of
the Oriental as the victim of enervating habits and more or less
vicious forms of self-indulgence. But while this may have
been true in the past, the tide is now definitely turning. Fifty
years of agitation in the United States have probably accom-
plished less to minimize intemperance among us than ten years
of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in ridding China
of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too
late to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking;
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 269
too late to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the
banks of the Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I
found such notices as the following concerning morphine,
cocaine and similar drugs:
"In accordance with instructions received through the Inspector-General
from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notifed that henceforth the impor-
tation into China of cocaine ... or instruments for its use, except by
foreign medical practitioners and foreign druggists for medical purposes, is
hereby prohibited."
And these foreign doctors handling cocaine are heavily
bonded. The Chinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is
little given to other forms of intemperance, is afire with new
enthusiasm for athletics and for military training; and he is
already so physically adaptable that I found him as hardy and
untiringly energetic beneath an equatorial sun in Singapore
as in the rigorous climate of north-central Manchuria. It
made me wonder if the "meek who are to inherit the earth"
in the end may not prove to be the Chinese!
Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or
if we realized more fully the keenness of the coming world-
struggle for industrial supremacy, we might find our pa-
triotism a stronger force in warding off some of the evils that
now threaten us. In his address to the German navy. Em-
peror William recently urged the importance of temperance
because of the empire's need of strong, clear-headed men,
unweakened by dissipation; and there can be little doubt that
some such patriotic motive has had not a little to do with the
anti-opium movement in awakening China. Certainly the
Japanese with their almost fanatical love of country are easily
influenced by such appeals, and keep such reasons in mind in
the training of their young. "For the sake of the Emperor
you must not drink the water from these condemned wells;
for the sake of the Emperor you must observe these sanitary
precautions — lest you start an epidemic and so weaken the
270 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Emperor's fighting forces!" So said the Japanese sanitary
oflBcers in the war with Russia; and when the struggle ended
Surgeon-General Takaki was able to boast in his oflBcial report:
*' In the Spanish-American War fourteen men died from disease to one from
bullets. We have established a record of four deaths from disease to one from
bullets."
In studying these Eastern peoples one is also led inevitably
to such reflections as Mr. Roosevelt gave utterance to in his
Romanes lectures a few months ago. Not only are the Orientals
schooled from their youth up to endure hardness like good
soldiers, but their natural increase contrasts strikingly with
the steadily decreasing birth-rate of our French and English
stocks. In Japan I soon came to remark that it looked almost
as unnatural to see a woman between twenty and forty with-
out a baby on her back as it would to see a camel without a
hump; and Kipling's saying about the Japanese "four-foot
child who walks with a three-foot child who is holding the
hand of a two-foot child who carries on her back a one-foot
child" came promptly to mind. In view of these things it
is not surprising to learn that in the last fifty years Japan has
increased in population, through the birth rate alone, "as fast
as the United States has gained from the birth rate plus her
enormous immigration." The racial fertility of the Chinese
is also well known; a Chinaman without sons to worship his
spirit when he dies is not only temporarily discredited but
eternally doomed. As for India, that every Hindu girl at
fourteen must be either a wife or a widow is a common saying,
and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" will recall the
ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also a
mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen.
Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the title of his new
book, "The Conflict of Color" — the seeming foreordination
of some readjustment of racial relations if present tendencies
continue — when he asserts that while the white races double
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 271
in eighty yejars, the yellow or brown double in sixty, and
the black in forty.
This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of
racial relations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are
the quahties that have given the white race the leadership
thus far? And what may we do for the conservation of these
qualities?
There are, of course, certain basic and fundamental reasons
for white leadership that I need not elaborate. For one thing,
there is the tonic air of democratic ideals in which long gen-
erations of white men have Uved and developed as contrasted
with the stifling absolutism of the East. There is also our
emphasis upon the worth of the Individual, our conception of
the sacredness of personality, as compared with the Oriental
lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard for the
family and the State. And even more important perhaps
is the fact that the white man has had a religion that has
taught — even if somewhat confusedly at times — that "man
is man and master of his fate," that he is not a plaything of
destiny, but a responsible son of God with enormous possibilities
for good or evil, whereas the Oriental has been the victim of
benumbing fatalism that has made him indifferent in industry
and achievement, though it has given him a greater reckless-
ness in war. It would also be difficult to exaggerate the
influence which our radically different estimate of woman has
had upon Western civilization. And here we have to con-
sider not only woman's own direct contributions to progress,
but also the indirect influence of our regard for woman, not
as an inferior and a plaything, but as a comrade and help-
meet. How frequently the ideal of English chivalry —
" To love one maiden only, cleave to her.
To worship her by years of noble deeds " —
has been the inspiration of the best that men of our race
have wrought, it needs only a glance at our Uterature to
272 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
suggest. These things are indeed basic and fundamental
and the question of their conservation, the preservation of
the ideals of the Occident as compared with those of the Orient,
is supremely important not only to us as a nation but to all
our human race. But when, one comes to consider only the
sheer economic causes of the difference between Oriental
poverty and Occidental plenty, it seems to me impossible to
escape the conviction, already expressed and elaborated that
it is mainly a matter of tools and knowledge, education
and machinery.
In the Orient every man is producing as little as possible;
in the Occident he is producing as much as possible. That is
the case in a nutshell.
With better knowledge and better tools, half the people
now engaged in food-production in Asia could produce all
the food that the entire rural population now produces, and
the other half could be released for manufacturing — thereby
doubhng the earning power and the spending power of the
whole population.
It is universal education and modem machinery, far more
than virgin resources, that have made America rich and power-
ful. Let her make haste then to learn this final lesson that the
Orient teaches — the necessity of conserving in the fullest
degree all the powers that have given us industrial supremacy:
the power of the trained brain and the cunning hand rein-
forced by all the magic strength that we may get from our
Briarean "Slave of the Lamp," modern machinery. We
must thoroughly educate all our people. Was it not an Orien-
tal prophet who wrote: "My people are destroyed for lack
of knowledge?" In China only 1 per cent, of the people can
now read and write, and the highest hope of the government
is that 5 per cent, may be Hterate by 1917. In India only
5 per cent, can read and write. In Japan for centuries pist,
the education of the common man has also been neglected,
but she is now compelling every child to go into the schools.
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 273
and her industrial system will doubtless be revolutionized as
a result.
In no case must we forget that education, if it is to be
efifective, must train for efficiency, must link itself with life
and work, must be practical. I had thought of the movement
for relating the school to industry as being confined to America
and Europe. But when I landed in Japan I found the edu-
cational authorities there as keenly alive to the importance of
the movement as ours in America; in China I found that
the old classical system of education has been utterly aban-
doned within a decade; in the Philippines it was the boast
of the Commissioner of Education that the elementary schools
in the islands give better training for agriculture and in-
dustry than those in the United States; and in India the school
authorities are earnestly at work upon the same problem.
Knowledge and tools must go hand in hand. If this has
been important heretofore it is doubly important now that
we must face in an ever-increasing degree the rivalry of awaken-
ing peoples who are strong with the strength that comes from
struggle with poverty and hardship, and who have set them-
selves to master and apply all our secrets in the coming world-
struggle for industrial supremacy and racial readjustment.
THE END
INDEX
American commerce abroad, 87-8,
91-2
American goods sold lower abroad,
101
Ancestor worship, Japan, 7-8
Area and population, Manchuria,
78; Philippines, 163; India, 211
Artistic Japanese, 40, 48-9
Diseases and sanitation, 56-64, 72,
135, 170-71
Dress, Japanese, 10-11; Indian, 216
Education, 272; Japanese, 17; Chi-
nese, 99. 109-11; Filipino, 168-9;
Indian, 210
Beans in Manchuria, 75-6
Beasts, India's wild, 258-60
Benares, 202
Boxer,.troubles, 125-26
Camels in China, 116-17
Canton, 142
Caste system, 226-35; effect on
labor, 229; robber caste, 231;
defended, 232
Child marriage in India, 237-8
Children, Hindu, 223-4
China, premonitions of revolution,
93, 102-6.
China Sea, 153
Chinese hardiness, 187-8
Chinese immigration, 114-15
Christian vs. Hindu philosophy, 199,
204-5
Christian vs. Oriental philosophy,
271
Cocoanut planting, 189
Confucianism, 103
Conservation of forests, 262-4
Cooperative credit societies, Japan,
25; India, 222
Crops — Rice. 23-5; cotton, 23. 78,
140, 168, 254-7; India's crops,
219
Currency reform in China, 97-98
Elephants, Stories about, 193-5
Extravagance, American, 264-6
Factory child labor, 268; Japan, 33
Family government, 7, 149
Famines in India, 218-20
Farm animals, Japan, 22; Man-
churia, 74; Philippines, 159
Farming — Japan, 21-28; Manchur-
ian, 76; Chinese, 122, 126-8, 143-
41, 177; Philippine, 155-6, 165;
Indian, 218-23, 255-7; tools, 23,
190, 218; houses, 26, 127, 156, 212
Fatalism, 227-8
Filipino character, 172
Filipino houses, 156
Foot binding, Chinese, 133-34
Funeral and burial customs, 77, 124,
128, 144-5, 203-4, 243
Ganges, 203
German commercial activity, 190
Government, Japanese, 4; Korea's
corrupt, 65-7; Chmese, 108
Great Walls, 120-21
Himalayas, The, 208-9
Hindu gods and goddesses, 200
Hindu village described, 212
275
276
mDEX
India, English rule in, 248-52
India's diversity of races, 248
Individual, repression of, 55-6
Industrial efficiency, 37, 40, 141
Japan control in Korea, 67-8; in
Manchuria, 78-92
Japanese city described, 9-11
Japanese-Russian War, 70-72; 90-91
Korea, 60-69
Language — Japanese spoken, 3;
written, 9-10; Chinese, 129-30
Lawrence, Sir Henry, 246
Love of nature, Japanese, 27
Machinery, Asia's refusal to use, 183
Manchuria's fertility, 73-4
Manila, 154
Manufacturing, Japan, 31, 34-47
Marriage customs, Japanese, 5-7,
139; Korean, 63; Chinese, 134:
Indian, 236-43
Missionary work, 59, 69; Japan, 51;
Korea, 68; Philippines, 164
Moral standards, 134, 136
Music, 5
Odd customs, Japan, 3-6, 12; Ko-
rean, 65
Oku ma. Count, interviewed, 44-5;
266
Open door in Manchuria, The, 78-92
Opium, China's crusade against.
94-6; 108
Parcels post, 101
Peking, Glimpses of, 123-25
Perry's Expedition, 58
Persecution of Christians, 51-2, 125-6
Philippine government, 167-70
Philippine resources, 165-7
Philippine scenery, 155-6
"Pidgin English," 150-51
Politeness, Japanese, 12, 13
Postal savings banks, 109
Poverty of Oriental people, 175
210, 252
Practical education, S9, 273
Punishments, Chinese, 145-6
Bacial fertility, 7, 11, 270-71
Railways, Manchurian, 83-6; Chinese,
139-40
Rangoon, 190-91
Religions, Shintoism, 49; Buddhism,
49-50, 151, U£-S; CcLiucianism,
lSG-31; Hinduism, U8-it(.8, 227
Roads, 74; in 1 Lilippices, 171
Rubber speculation, 188
School term, Japan, 17-18
Size of farms, Japan, 21; China, 126
Slavery in China, lb2
Social gradations, Japanese, 16
"Squeeze" svsttm in China, 96, 112
Stoiy, A Chinese, 146-7
Superstitions, 77, 128-9
Taj Mahal described, 244-5
Tariff — Japanese, 30. 44-6; Chi-
nese, 112
Taxes in Japan, 30
Torrens land titles, S8, 169-70
Tropical vegetation, 186
Wages — Japan, 29, 34, 36, 42, 174;
China, 126, 141, 174. 177; Burma,
196; India, 210, 223, 253-4
War spirit, 267; Japan, 35, 72. 266;
China, 111-12
Wedding, A Hindu, 239
Welfare work in Japanese factories
31-3
Woman's degraded position, 271;
Japan, 6, 52-6, India, 236-44
Women laborers, SO, 43, 177, 253-4
T\ u ling lang interviewed, 139
Yang -bans. The, 66
Yangtze River, 1S8-9
Die 21 wi
One copy del. to Cat. Div.
•EC 21 i*n
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